Heave your career up

Come Diwali, don’t you spruce up your home? If that be so, don’t you think that a similar attempt should be directed at your career? You must take stock of where you stand and the progress that you have accomplished since the last time such an exercise was undertaken. In the light of your findings, you need to decide on changes that need to be ushered and plans to hone your skills. In other words, you must get cracking for formulating a line of action for the future of your career.

An exercise to yank your career can be undertaken at any time. Some tips in this context are explained in the succeeding paragraphs. They are not required to be followed in the sequence in which they have been discussed and you can devote as much time as possible to each of them.

· Look at your life & career holistically: There are some issues about which you must seek answers from yourself. Do you feel that the place where you are currently is where you actually wanted to be? Has your progress been steady ascendancy or are you where you were? What is the degree of harmony between your life’s objectives and your present job and career course? Have you been able to strike a good work-life balance? You need to be honest in your responses distinct advantages will accrue to you derive benefits of planning and initiate actions to bring about definite improvements. It is only thereafter that you should proceed ahead.

· Set objectives for your job search & career: Attaining success sans any objectives is sheer luck. Objectives and a career vision help you to attain more and derive greater delight on accomplishing any one of them. The exercise necessitates exploring various career alternatives and hence, you should get acquainted with different pursuits in your specific career line and identify specific jobs within its gamut that are vital for formulating your career objectives. Your career objectives have to be realistic and if things so warrant, you can decide to even affect a career change.

· Refresh & expand your contact base: Your current status vis-à-vis your present job or your job search efforts notwithstanding, the need to have a wide contact base needs no emphasis. It is a very potent weapon under your dominating influence. You must nurture good associations with everybody you know and make serious attempts to enlarge your network. Taking membership of a professional fraternity or connecting with people whom you have forgotten will prove to be very useful.  

· Hone your skill & expertise: If you fail to keep abreast with latest developments and acquire relevant skills, you are likely to become antediluvian. You need to develop your communications and interpersonal skills; they are essential for crisis management, meeting deadlines and maintaining camaraderie. In addition, hard skills that hold the key in your job and career alike also need to be improved upon. You need to get cracking to acquire relevant knowhow for your job and career. You could enrol for evening classes, subscribe to distance education programmes or take up an online course. If your company’s has a policy to support such efforts, you could possibly go in for a regular curriculum. Once you acquire additional qualifications or improve your existing skills set, you will be able to enhance your very scope of employment.

· Refine your CV: When people get into a job, their resume starts gathering dust. Your CV needs continual updating. It has to be in consonance with current drafting trends and custom-made for particular jobs and companies.  

· Be acquainted with new job hunting practices: You need to be adept at engendering and profiting from job leads. It is essential that you know the best places where jobs could be listed – newspapers or online job portals - so that you are geared up to face any adverse eventuality. If you have gone through the process earlier, you may perhaps realise that quite a number of jobs are not even advertised; they get filled up with word-of-mouth publicity.

· Learn how to face interviews: Your ability to face and do well in an interview is the crowning glory of your job search. It is never too late to review and refine your skills in this context. You need to research on what interviewers seek to find out from candidates, how questions are put to them and be prepared with your responses. In fact, you have to develop your individual marketing strategy to facilitate making a good impression.  

· Put your USPs to test: The prospects in the job market vary from time to time and are greatly contingent on upon how self-assured you are about your worth in it. If you have followed the above tips, you stand perched at an advantageous position to sell yourself to a prospective employer. You have to convince your employer that you are indeed the best among all candidates. It is your creativity and ingenuity in putting forward your skills that will matter.

· Don’t rule out the prospect of staying put with your current company: During the last twenty years in particular, mutual trust employees and employers has declined. Organisational restructuring and retrenchments have caused employees to keep looking for opportunities outside. You should not be impulsive to leave your present company. It is possible that an absence of adequate growth prospects apart, you may not have anything else adverse against it. Under such circumstances, mulling over different career courses and opportunities within your present company will not be a wrong proposition.

Remember that the only way of discovering the confines of the conceivable is by going beyond them into the impossible. If you can dream it, there is no reason why you cannot achieve it. And if you believe that you can do it, half your battle is already won. You need not live your fears; all you need to do is to work hard and walk that extra mile. There will be no traffic jams along that extra mile. You will be able to yank your career the way you want.