What do you need to control your career?

Each one of us has the ability to control the path that our careers take. It requires that we become truly self-aware so that we can identify what our own interests and passions, our strengths and weaknesses, our communication skills, and our job-search skills are.

Your interests and passions

Are you truly happy in your current career path? Many of us spend our lives doing work that we don’t truly enjoy. We do it because we need to pay the bills, or put food on the table. But if we are intentional about it, we can discover what type of work will provide for our financial needs and will be fulfilling as well.

Identifying our strengths and weaknesses

Since no one is perfect, we all have weaknesses as well as strengths. But when you look at your weaknesses honestly, you transform them into areas that you can work on to improve your own career potential. For example, imagine you are unorganized or have issues with time management. You can learn how to become more organized and to become a masterful manager of your time. If you have a hard time working with a certain kind of person – and we all do – what would you normally do about it? Get angry, suffer over it, wish you were somewhere else? What if you could learn to look at that as your own weakness rather than as the other person’s fault, you suddenly have a power to do something about it – something that you didn’t have before. This is all part of an honest inventory of our strengths and weaknesses with an intention of moving our career forward.

Enhancing your skills

There are also some skills that are important for managing your career because they will do two things: Make you more desirable as a job candidate and keep you in a positive attitude and well-motivated to continue managing your career. Some of these skills are also useful in your everyday life and your relationships outside of work. These skills include: Communication skills, motivation skills, and emotional intelligence.

Job-search skills

Finally, in order to manage your career, you need to manage which jobs you pursue. Gone are the times when a person would start and end their career with the same company. Instead, people who truly manage their careers are strategic about which jobs they take and why. They look at each position as a rung in a ladder, not as a permanent destination. To be good at changing jobs, you need to be good at getting them. The more you practice these skills, the easier you will find job hunting to be.

You can find more tips on how to control your career in “Managing your career” by MTD Training.

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