A career is not a job; it is a period of growth through which you get the jobs you want. Point number seven on this list asks you to learn whilst working on your career, which is good advice, but what is more important is that you learn from negative experience as well as learning how to do your job better. You can learn from negative experiences whilst starting your career so that you may avoid them when your career has matured.

1.Be Smart And Build Your Experience Profile

Some people only ever see the end game or the final goal, and it is very short sighted. For example, if you want to be a real estate professional for large industrial complexes where you earn millions in commission, then do you start at an estate agency as a junior? No, you spend six months in a call centre to help you learn how to deal with difficult customers, you spend a year selling cars to get face-to-face experience, you spend another year selling industry services from an office.

When it is time to apply to an estate agency, you have a broader skill set, experience profile and a more proactive attitude. You enter the job as a high flyer instead of a slow starter, and you quickly push and bully your way up to selling to larger clients as opposed to first-time house buyers. Sure, you have to gain experience in the estate agency first, but you do not have to do it for 20 years before you are allowed to see bigger contracts.

2.Understand That A Career Takes Sacrifice

People with slow or stop-start careers are people that put themselves and their family before their career. Working on your career means sacrifice, and it always means inconvenience. It certainly means you have to give more than for what you are paid.

3.Take Your Career Home With You

If your math skills are a little shaky, then you should be taking online courses whilst at home. You should be planning your next move, contacting high-profile people on social media, and you should be preparing for your next day at work. Your career doesn’t go away at 5pm, is stays with you until you fall asleep. Many high flyers have had their best ideas driving home, in the bath, or in their study.

Many of the world’s programmers will literally get up out of bed, sometimes in the middle of the night, because they thought of a programming solution to a problem that has been bothering them all week.

4.It Is “Who You Know”

Get to know people in your workplace, in your college, on the Internet, and get to know your company’s clients. Make friends with your parent’s friends and your friend’s friends. Great careers have been built on the back of getting lucky and knowing somebody that was able to connect them with a client, a new job, or an influential person. Even the ideas of others can be used to help you climb the ladder. It would be nice if people got promotions based on merit, but that is not the world we live in.

5.Engineer Your Online Reputation

Go through all of your social media profiles and strip them down so you can start from scratch. Make sure they all correspond to the image and reputation that is conducive to your chosen career. If you want to be civil engineer, then take down pictures of you smoking pot in college, or of you driving without any hands, and put up pictures of you at conferences, seminars, and engaged in civil engineering projects.

6.Earn Your Promotion Or Leave For It

There are two ways to get a promotion, you can earn it in your job, or you can apply for the promoted position with another company. Your best bet is to try earning your promotion within the job you currently hold. However, if you hit a roadblock and it looks like you will not get the promotion for a long time, then search for another company with a suitable opening in the promoted position and get your promotion that way.

7.Learning Is Your Best Ally

There are people that spend 20 years working the same job and they may only know marginally more than a person that started six months ago. It is vitally important that you take the time to learn about things in your workplace, even things that do not involve you. If you are working as a junior accountant, then why not research into their accounting software, or their business processes, or the accounting chain? The more you learn, the less likely it is you will be stuck in the same job forever.

Author's Bio: 

Joan Gilbert is a free writer and free recruiter that worked for 7 years for a recruitment agency. Today Joan Gilbert is working as a writer for student service coursework help service she sold her firm for over $3 million and has since been giving speeches and writing posts to help others achieve their career goals.