We are lucky to have Jenna from PF Twins on the blog today.
As a young professional working a 9-5, your career is an important part of your life.
For one, most of us spend at least a third of our day working.
Whether you want to earn more money, create a more flexible work day, or just do the work you enjoy, how do you actually move your career in the right direction?
As Cal Newport argued in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, a strong skill set is is essential to creating the career you want.
The best way to build skills is to design a strategic skills plan. With a blueprint to follow, you’ll invest your time in the right skills. You’ll also know exactly how to go from idea to action.
1) Know What You Want From Your Work
It’s your career; it’s up to you to decide your work. Spend sometime daydreaming and envisioning your future career. What’s compelling to you?
However, if don’t know what you want, don’t stop here. Make it a goal explore your values and work on the question. In the meantime, I suggest picking the option that seems most interesting to you right now. You’ll find out more about what you want to do with your career by trying something.
2) Figure Out The Skills You Want To Pursue
Once you have some idea of where you’d like to head with your career, there are strategies to clarify your general hunch into a specific direction. As social psychologist Dan Gilbert wrote in his bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness, the best way to get a clear idea of what skills are needed to succeed in your chosen direction is to actually talk to someone in your desired position.
Identify a role model with 5 to 10 more years of experience than you in your chosen career. It could be someone in your company, someone in your network, or even a blogger. Reach out to that person over email and take them out to coffee. Ask them what technical and soft skills are needed to succeed. You’ll identify important skills to work into your plan.
3) Check In On Your Own Skills
With your industry insight in hand, it’s time to check in on your current skill set. Survey your strengths and weaknesses. Consider your soft skills like organization, the ability to talk to others one-on-one, and public speaking.
Look at your technical skills like graphic design, information management, or programming ability. What are you good at? What do you enjoy? Two great books related to this are Strengths Finders and Discover Your Strengths.
4) Determine What Skills To Pursue
At this point, with industry knowledge and insight into your own skills, you should have a high level overview of useful skills. It’s time to pick what skills you’d like invest your time in. I recommend focusing on improving your strengths. When we focus on our strengths in our careers, we perform better at our jobs.
Pick one or two skills you’d like to tackle immediately. Even if you’d like to build many skills, it’s tough to do everything at the same time. You can sequence your skills. Learn CSS now and then in a year learn Java.
5) Set A Goal To Measure Progress
With a specific skill in mind, it’s time to set goals. What’s the finish line? Pick something measurable and with a deadline.
For example, if you are trying to learn a foreign language, you could take a beginner level Common European Framework of References for Languages (CERFL) test. If you are trying to learn a programming language, you could take a test on Brainbench. With a specific criteria for success and a deadline, you’ll have a structured way of measuring progress on your goal.
6) Create A Habit To Reach Your Goal
How many of us have set goals and never do anything to reach them? The key is moving beyond a goal into creating a habit. Find a way to work your goal into your daily, weekly, or monthly routine.
Break your skill goal down into a manageable chunk. Think small — we often overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do over time. For example, if your goal is to an amazing job presenting at an upcoming conference, commit to going to Toastmasters two times a month. If you’d like to learn a programming language, commit to putting down ten lines of code a day.
To really cement a habit, create a trigger to start the habit and a reward for finishing the habit. For example, my daily goal is to write 100 words. Before I go to sleep at night, I set up my work station for the next day: a document with my topic, headphones next to the computer, and Pandora on the classical music channel. When I get up in the morning, this set-up is my trigger to begin writing. My reward is the rush I get from publishing.
In your case, you might find calendar reminders or an app like Lift helpful in creating triggers and rewards for yourself. For more ideas about triggers and rewards, I recommend the book The Power of Habit.
_________________
Building tangible skills is important to taking control of your work to create the career you want. With a strategic skill plan, you can build skill improvement into your daily life.
Do you find building skills important to improving your career? What’s your approach to skill building?
Author BioJenna VanLeeuwen is a freelance writer who blogs with her twin sister Brooke about managing money to create the life you want over at PF Twins.
Check out some of our favorite personal finance resources:
Are you getting the best credit card rewards? Check out the top cash back credit card offers (updated daily)
Make extra money: 15 ways to make money from your computer
Get the First Chapter Free!
Join our online community and get the first chapter of the book Student Loan Solution absolutely FREE!
I’m always looking to pick up new skills and I’m lucky that it’s been a huge part of my performance criteria each year (meaning, my employer pays me to take short courses or get certifications). I like to check out intetesting-sounding jobs even if I’m not in the career market. The postings give me an idea what skills great employers are looking for and then I can make a plan to go after developing those skills.
On your point around picking what’s most interesting to you right now, I just read a book called ‘The Quarter-Life Breakthrough’ that talks about jumping to new ‘lily-pads’ to try new, interesting things, which I found quite interesting, and similar to what you suggest.
I’m also a huge fan of both the Power of Habit book (I included it in my recent ‘Library’ list) and the Lift app. Habits really are the key to everything!
Must admit, I’ve probably become a bit passive in my career skill-building given I’ve been in a similar role for 10 years (definitely haven’t jumped to too many lily-pads!)and carved out a nice little niche. I’m always trying to balance doing a decent job at work with developing skills and interests outside of work – in things I’d much prefer to be doing in the long run. But I should probably put some effort back into sharpening the current job skills…
In my opinion, the only way to improve your skills is to keep practicing and honing them. Unfortunately, that is the only way to turn any talent you have into a marketable skill. I am hopefully getting better at my job as time goes along. I should- because I spend 40 hours per week practicing my craft.
Holly at ClubThrifty I agree. The more you practice, the better.
Jason@Islands of Investing I loved the Power of Habits!
If you jump too many “lily-pads” you won’t really become a master at anything, so there does seem to be a balance between the two.
indebtedmom You sound like me! I love checking in on the market, making a plan, and then following through.
I absorb information easily and learn things quickly so I’m always looking for new ways to challenge myself in my career and develop my skills further. When learning new skills it’s important to continually measure your progress and see what areas you need to improve upon.
I was always an extremist. I can now do things in bite sizes, and it’s made me way more productive. Great tips, Jenna! :)
I love the advice to keep pushing past step 1. It can feel so overwhelming to not know what you want in your future. If you’re surrounded by people with a clear goal of where they want to go, you might feel discouraged for not having your own life planned out. The important thing is to pick something and try it. If you didn’t love it and want to commit to it long term, try the next thing on the list. It isn’t ideal, but it’s a more manageable way to figure out what you want out of life.
BudgetandBees Thanks! I know this one from experience because I was stuck being indecisive for two years!
kay ~ lifestylevoices.com Thanks, Kay! The awesome part about bite-sized pieces — It adds up to something pretty cool in the end.
Kassandra @ More Than Just Money I agree. Developing skills is the best.
Congtats on jumping on board Jenna, you really are great at this networking! :)
You make some really good points and building the skills are critical to success, my approach is by actually considering what I enjoy doing and then finding ways to do more of this on a day to day basis. Then as you say creating those habits are important to build on the skills you want to create!
I have a tendency to start building a skill then drop off. I think tackling one thing at a time is important. Too easy to get overload otherwise.
Knowing what you want from work is like knowing what you want from your money. If you have no clue, it’s easy to burn out or always think the grass is greener on the other side. No job is perfect, but if you have some goals about what you want it to be and how to get there, it’s much more manageable.
I think I’m focusing more on building relationships and just doing what I already know better and doing it more so that people can see what I’m working on, versus trying to convince them of what I can do. Does that make sense?
mycareercrusade That’s a great way to build in improvement on a daily basis.
brokeandbeau I also love to do everything all at the same time. It’s hard to stay the course that way so I try to resist.
Beachbudget I like the sound of that approach. For myself, I wanted to switch fields so I needed to build some skills outside my area.
Eyesonthedollar It’s so tough if you don’t have a clue. Once you have a direction everything becomes easier.