A job is an important step to build a career

Your job is a launch pad for success in your career and life. It is in your job that you acquire vital abilities, develop prime associations and unveil your accomplishments. Your career journey may involve numerous jobs; and even if you serve in a single organisation, you will hold different appointments where the work involved will not be the same. As you become senior, you will be required to shoulder diverse responsibilities, including resource management.

If you have to build your career, knowing how to land up in a job or for that matter getting into one may not be enough. You should be adept at the following:

· Knowing how to do well and come out with flying colours; and being in complete control of all facets of your career, including job security.

· Cultivating, enlarging and sustaining professional bonds; and managing difficult encounters at work to include dealing with confidentiality issues, gender bias and problematic co-workers.  

· Maintaining a good work-life balance and identifying better prospects and new openings, both in in your current company and outside.

It is essential that during the first three months at your job, you create a good impact. You need to have a well-defined and distinct image of the outcomes that you envisage; in addition, you should be clear about how they will be determined and assessed. However, the most important issue that will hold relevance always is the equation that you have with your superiors, particularly your immediate boss.

Having a good equation with your immediate boss is alright, but it is equally important to maintain similar ties with other people as well. Your immediate boss will guide you, but surely you would like a guru other than him too. Besides your co-workers in your department, there will be contemporaries in other departments as well. There will be other senior appointment holders and also people higher up in the hierarchy. It goes without saying that you are working for an organisation and everybody and clients and suppliers also matter and with whom you need to have proficient relationships. Likewise, there will be many like you working in similar set-ups and you would like to network with them too.

It will be absolutely wrong to presuppose that if you acquit yourself well at work, everybody will automatically get to know about it. A down to business superintendence of your career with a focus on its progression is essential. Depending upon the organisation that you serve in, there will be stipulated processes wherein you can get an advice on your performance and also gain salary hikes and promotions. But the initiative to utilize the processes and procedures has to come from you.

You simply cannot presume that the job that you are in will be there forever. Your company can retain you for as long as your services are required. Here again, the initiative to make yourself indispensable has to come from you. It is therefore, necessary that you keep your wits about so that your job security remains safeguarded. But you need to be prepared for the worst case scenario too – what do you do if you have to leave so that maximum support is forthcoming from your company during the changeover period.

Besides a surprise retrenchment, there will be several other tests and trials that will loom over you. The very fact that you spend nearly half your time at your workplace, there are bound to be workplace problems and discords. You must visualise such problems and be on the lookout for the same. Though every problem will have to be tackled based on its specific peculiarities, the fact is that you will be prepared 24/7 to deal with all such eventualities. But spending a large part of your time at workplace will also render you mechanically and instinctively more concentrated towards your work. It is likely that you may not be able to maintain a proper work-life balance and in the process your individual concerns go unattended. You must maintain a robust equation between your work and personal obligations. 

As stated earlier, a career journey will never be sans ups and downs. You may do some real good career management and build excellent networking, but even then you may be shown the door. It could be that you have gone slow or aspire to do something not the same. This may necessitate managing your career so that you can also focus on alternatives and for that, a strong and dependable network is inescapable. Your own skills and aptitude should be sought after by your prospective employer. And for that, you will have to make constant endeavours to learn and grow in your current job; this will make you prized to your present company and also to all others.

Remember that the best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today. And nothing will work unless you do.