How to Keep Your Career Moving Upwards – Career Advancement Strategies
How to keep your career moving upwards is a question most of us think about. Pretty much everyone would like career progress, otherwise we would be stuck doing the same job for a very long time. Some want to reach lofty career goals yesterday. Others are happy with much slower and steadier progress. Plenty of people get stuck at a given level in their careers and can’t seem to progress further.
I was promoted 13 times in 13 years from trainee to board director of a large company while still in my 30’s. 5 of those promotions were gained while moving company.
I am assuming that you are happy to work hard, and you are doing a good job right now. Both are fundamental to keep your career moving upwards but not enough in themselves for regular promotion. These 4 actions will help you get ahead and stay ahead of your peers at every level.
How to Keep Your Career Moving Upwards
Choose a career goal and stick to it
Cultivate a learning mindset
A positive attitude gets you ahead
Moving company is probably a necessity
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1 – choose a career goal and stick to it – how to keep your career moving upwards
To really keep your career moving, it is best to keep working consistently at developing skills in a specialised area until you are very good before moving to something different. Each time you change direction, you have to step backwards. Sometimes back to entry levels.
Consistently getting better year after year will get you a long way in any career. I moved up through the ranks as a chartered accountant, making it all the way to a board role in a large company before I changed course. The consistency of my career goal helped me massively in actually achieving it. I spent little effort as possible outside what was need to achieve my main goal and all the time and effort I could in service in reaching my goal.
Choose a goal and stick to achieving that goal. Most people aiming for management roles can choose the head of their function as a default goal if you are struggling.
The higher you climb up career ranks, the harder it becomes to move up the next step. I think that you really have to want to reach your goal to put all the effort and time into overcoming the hurdles and challenges in the way of achieving your goal. Choose a goal you really want to reach.
2 – cultivate a learning mindset to keep your career moving upwards
I think that this is one of the most important actions to keep your career moving upwards. At every level as you go through the professional ranks into the management ranks, you need to learn new skills and new approaches. If you don’t learn, you won’t be nearly as effective in your job and therefore you won’t progress your career.
People with learning mindset or growth mindset look for opportunities to learn and improve from everything. Inside work. Outside work. Successes, failures … the lot. People with a learning mindset believe – at the core of their being – that when they work to learn and improve, they will keep getting better. People who cultivate a growth mindset are simply more successful.
When you start learning anything, you will experience failures and setbacks. This is totally normal and part of the learning process. To get good at anything, you have to pick yourself up and try again. Do this again and again and providing you are learning throughout; you will get good.
As you keep your career moving upwards, spend more of your time and energy improving your people skills. If you are in the management ranks, people skills are the most important set of skills for you. More and more of your job is leading, persuading, building relationships, coaching, teaching, directing, organising others … everything to do with helping other people deliver more in their jobs.
At every level, if you want to keep your career moving upwards, you must keep yourself open to learning. Even better is to actively seek to learn and get better at every opportunity.
3 – A positive attitude gets you ahead
People like working with positive can do colleagues. Positivity makes working life more enjoyable for everyone around them. People who are positive are more likely to be liked by colleagues and customers. Positive people are probably more likely to learn and try new things.
When managers are considering people for promotion, those that have a positive attitude and approach are much more likely to get the promotion than colleagues that are negative, complain a lot etc.
If managers need to reduce headcount because of a downturn, those that are negative and downbeat are much more likely to go before more positive colleagues.
Work on your attitude. Work at being a stronger team player. Help those around when you have the opportunity. Pass on your skills and knowledge to others. Help your boss look good and do a better job. Smile and be a pleasure to work with. Take on new tasks with enthusiasm.
There is so much you can do to show you have a positive will do attitude, and 9 times out of 10, you will get rewarded for having this attitude.
4 – realise that moving company is probably a necessity to Keep your career moving
Unless you work for a very large company employing thousands of people, you are likely going to have to move company to keep your career moving upwards. There are only so many suitable promotion opportunities available in any company at any given time. Your boss might not want to move their career forwards as quickly as you so becomes a blocker to your career progress. Most of you will need to move company to keep your career moving forwards.
Being good at writing CVs and passing interviews are specific skill sets that most don’t spend enough time to build. This is a mistake. How good you are at communicating exactly what you can do and how well you can do it is a vital to getting access to the better jobs. i.e. those jobs that are promotion opportunities in good companies with great development opportunities to keep your career moving upwards. There are plenty of dead end jobs out there. Being good at getting through the recruitment process will help you avoid them.
Invest the time to get good at writing your CV and passing interviews. This has been incredibly valuable to me and I think are essential skills in todays workplace. I gained 5 of my 13 promotions this way.
Here is a link to a free webinar sharing over 40 actionable techniques to improve how you write your CV and communicate how good you really are at your job. Register and write your best CV and get way ahead of your peers with averagely written CVs.
in summary
Hard work and being good at your job is not enough in itself to keep your career moving upwards. These four actions will help you keep moving forwards, regardless of what job you do:
- Choose a career goal and stick to it
- Cultivate a learning mindset
- A positive attitude gets you ahead
- Moving company is probably a necessity
If you have any questions on “How to Keep Your Career Moving Upwards”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Keeping your career moving upwards throughout your career is absolutely achievable when you commit to a clear career goal and you are prepared to continually learn and improve. Yes, this approach takes intelligent effort and work to continue to improve your skills and the value you can add to a business.
I don’t believe there is a better or faster approach that will work consistently over a lifetime. Loving what you do is a huge motivator to put in that time and effort. Learn from everything you can and try to be the best version of yourself you can be. Don’t chase money. Chase experience and skills and the money will come. Don’t step on others. Lift others up alongside you – they will return the favour rather than try to block you.
Focus on building your skills and the value you can add!
