Be career-conscious to maintain a lead

Quite a few people tend to sail through their careers from the time they take up a job and eventually superannuate. While they go to work every day and sweat it out, they are not truly sentient of their career, particularly when it comes to giving it a direction for achievement of their objectives. But people who are career-conscious deliberate on what seek to accomplish in their professional endeavours and devise ways and means to do so. Consequentially, such people remain at the wheels and are generally not dictated by others or events. They are able to visualise and address hold-ups to their benefit.

Here are ten aspects that you need to do to be career-conscious and maintain a lead over others in your career journey:

· Remain at the wheels: To believe that your company or manager is responsible for your career development will amount to being presumptuous. You should be aware that the responsibility is yours and hence you have to be at the wheels and navigate through your career successfully.

· Be aware of happenings around you: Primarily, this entails being awake and responsive to what is happening in your company. Today, with stiff competition around, companies tend to be impacted by global developments over which they have no influence whatsoever. Therefore, if you are alert, you will exert yourself successfully at your job. In quite a number of instances, people tend to take impulsive or uninformed career decisions and land up in unforeseen difficult situations. If you want to be always ready for unforeseen developments, it is essential that you keep your eyes and ears open.

· Engage yourself in continual learning: While your company may organise learning and development programmes, the basic responsibility to update your skills and knowledge is yours. The initiative has to come from you alone. You cannot wait for your company to ask you to improve your qualifications or develop a particular skills set. If you think that your company will make available to you the wherewithal or details, you will be sadly mistaken. You will have to ideate all plans to increase your individual worth, experience and knowledge on a continuous basis.

· Nurture potent associations: All successful people invariably have a wide network of people and influence. They always have people readily available on whom they can bank upon. You need to foster excellent relationships with your co-workers and seniors alike because you can never predict when you will require their assistance. Learning from people in your contact base is always a big possibility.

· Seek periodic appraisals: It is essential to be aware if you are pulling on well with your boss. You should know how he or she views you and this can be possible only if you sit across the table and seek an appraisal about your performance. Doing so will reinforce the psychological robustness of your work place, an aspect necessary to put up with your career.

· Be on the lookout for openings and prospects: Most of the times, people are nor even aware of various opportunities available within an organisation for career advancement. But if you keep your wits about, you can always let people know about your willingness. It is also essential to keep an eye on openings elsewhere too and for that you will need to establish liaison and contact with individuals outside your company. Social media sites are a good platform for the purpose.  

· Evaluate your worth: Depending upon your experience and length of service, you will have to your credit a definite worth that is centred on them. Needless to state, but important is the point that such worth is perpetually connected with some people and groups in your life as also your availability. To be able to move forward, you need to know what your worth is and who is likely to appreciate it.

· Build an exclusive brand image: It is all about being able to project yourself in the job market. Your CV is a potent tool towards this alright, but you need to focus on making use of social media sites for the purpose. Your presence on such sites needs to be controlled too so that the image is portrayed in consonance with your intended objectives.

· Don’t deviate from your path & be explicit: If at all you want to affect any change in your career at any time in your career journey, you will need to be precise, detailed and unambiguous. It is your degree of clarity with regard to whatever you want to seek and how you intend doing so that will help you to move forward.

If you want to be career-conscious, you need not take giant strides or mammoth decisions in a single day. Small, progressive steps to take charge of your career and reach the endpoint of your career journey will be inescapable.