Press forward in your career

You could be working in a large multinational or a small local set-up; you could be holding a senior position or a junior one; your workplace could be located in a high-rise building in a high-end locality or in a small shed. All these issues are of little significance when it comes to staying in work for the years to follow.

The key to remaining employable is your own ingenious exploit. There are three strategies that you should adopt vis-à-vis your career:

· You must regard your career as your own business venture: The issue of career management is that even if you happen to work for somebody else, you must regard your career as your own venture and take care of it. Today, retrenchments, restructuring, acquisitions and mergers are quite common; and you should not allow yourself to sit at a place other than behind the steering wheel. Rather than thinking that you are working for somebody else, you should think as if you are a self-employed person, a master of one’s own destiny. You must raise some very tough queries with yourself like the nature of business that you are engaged in, your product line and the market for it. Whatever be your trade, you should identify at least three characteristics and advantages each of your skills; and be awake to your true value in the job market. Your perception of your workplace ought to change; in fact you must see your career as a business, a venture that is supposedly totally yours wherein you are the whole sole in charge of each and everything in it. Now when that happens, you will become the driving force of your own career and the nit-picky winds of change will have no role to play.           

· You should be able to utilise your skills everywhere: When you work, you do so on the basis of certain abilities and expertise; these are invariably required to accompany you everywhere. What are the skill sets that you are carrying along with you? Are they few or are they many and varied? The more they are, the more is your competitive advantage. In order to maintain your competitive advantage, it is essential that you take stock of your skill-sets from time to time and gauge them for their quality and standards. This will necessitate doing a comparative evaluation vis-à-vis your colleagues; issues that will have to be looked into will be your academic qualifications, training courses undergone, quantum of experience to your credit and your career advancement. You could be well-qualified now when compared with what you were a couple of years back; and hence better-poised to take on all future challenges. In case you are not, then you would need to reorganise yourself because to move ahead tomorrow implies being in a similar position today. It is of little consequence where you are in the corporate hierarchy today. What is significant is that you should be well-versed in executing assigned tasks with the skill-sets that you possess, not in your current job, but elsewhere too. Your skill-set and their relevance are aspects that will stand you in good stead, given the ever-altering competitive work environments that exist today.      

· You should be pragmatically smart and realistically canny: You need to be aware that workplace rules are being subjected to change on a continuous basis. If that be so, you should be also aware of aspects that will ensure that you remain relevant and pertinent. In other words, you have to be a person who still matters and who cannot be ignored or discounted at any time. The career game has indeed changed; it is based on creativity, prominence and suppleness. The foregoing thrusts two major liabilities on you – display of headship attributes and remaining prominent at all times. You simply cannot afford to hide behind curtains or a bookshelf and remain preoccupied with routine tasks. It is essential that you look much beyond your primary duties and make concerted efforts to ensure compliance and completion of what your boss desires or whatever your section or  team seeks to do. You should thus make yourself crucial to all matters. You may be required to do some self-marketing by dwelling on the results of your endeavours. Whatever be the name and repute that gets tagged on to you, it could facilitate or hamper your prospects of succeeding. You could well earn a good reputation by being associated with successful projects that propel you to wide publicity, so much so that people who get to see you can influence your career. This will surely be possible if you play a lead role in raising a new section for an ensuing project, ensuring that technology is smoothly adopted by organising and controlling its introduction or being part of projects that call for inter- and intra-office liaison work, including handling allied communication responsibilities.     

Remaining ahead of others calls for an intense determination, particularly in the present day world that is plagued with extreme competition. You must understand that an individual who is going to be successful in his or her career will do so not because of ‘work well done’ alone. If you are working, you are expected to work hard, work well anyway. What will put you ahead of others is your ready-for-action spirit, your gung-ho! It is your competitive advantage that will matter a lot.