How to maximize your career potential

If you want to juice up your career and get to the next level in you career path that you feel has been put in neutral for a long time then we got some tips for you to maximize your career potential. We will cover some topics that will help you to develop a strategy to improve your ability to get the job that you have been working for all of these years. When you think of how people excel in their career, the common factors of success can be divided into the following components: education, self-motivation, planning, performance, and having a champion.

Need an education to meet your career ambitions

There are certain jobs that require a candidate to achieve a level of education or specialization in order to be qualified for a position. One of the major criterion for success is to have the education that is needed to opens up the job opportunities that were not available to you before. There are many instances where you here about people going back to school part-time to work on getting their college degree, masters degree, or an MBA to help them get the job that they want at the salary that they are looking for to support their needs. Education is definitely a foundation towards success and this is something that you want to investigate further in finding the right educational program to meet your career needs.

You need to be self-motivated

This is an important trait that you must have in order to be successful is that you have to be self-motivated to reach for your goals. No one person should be a key motivator to your success but success should be your own motivation that is driven internally from within your being. You should be your own inspiration that drives you forward in studying hard, and working hard towards that promotion at your job. You know sometimes, it takes some type of jarring event to shake things up for you emotionally to make some type of change to help benefit you in the long run. You do not want to wait for something drastic to happen to you to influence your behavior. This type of event could be that you lose your job. You want to make the necessary changes prior to any events that would occur to help self motivate you to achieve your goals and ambitions. You want to help influence change in how people perceive you and how you affect others in your communications and interactions with your co-workers. You have an opportunity to make something of yourself and your career should be enough motivation to get you started.

You need to plan your career

You will be surprised by the number of people who are working day-to-day and going with the motions of their jobs not sure where the next day would take them. Most employers have a yearly performance review that is set up to help set short-term goals between you and the employer but these goals are sometimes very task oriented in completing project work. Corporate performance reviews are meant to help align the employees with the missions of their organizations and providing an avenue of growth for employees but the implementation of these performance reviews in the corporate world are far from perfect. This is the time when you need to do your own planning and develop a careerguide to help you look at your own career goals and objectives from now till the foreseeable future. Planning is an excellent activity that many people often do not perform when they think about their careers because people do prefer to work on action oriented items and do not understand how planning can help them bring clarity to their long-term vision of what they want from their careers. There are numerous articles on the internet on career planning that you should look up and they can provide a good template to help you get started in mapping out your short, mid, and long-term goals for your career.

You need to be a performer

The common 80-20 rule which is the Pareto principle that is often talked about in the corporate world across the globe that 80% of the work in the office comes from 20% of the people. If you think about that statement for a second then you realize why there are so many companies that are looking at six sigma as a potential savior in improving their quality and efficiency to reduce corporate waste. The point of this is that you want to be part of the 20% of the population at your office that is contributing to the work. You want to be the person that management can count on at all times to get the hard work done. You need to be a solid contributor that consistently over performs in one or two areas. This will make sure that your work speaks for itself and will help you build the reputation that you need to continue to move to the next level.

You need to have a champion

Believe it or not but one of the most important things that you need is to have that one person in the higher management ranks that notices you and has the ability to help you move further in your career. We can not emphasize the importance of having a champion that will help people notice the great work that you are doing and help remove any roadblocks that get in your way when you are trying to suggest new solutions. You are going to need a champion to help communicate to other senior managers about your capabilities and to have someone help guide you in your career.