Disclaimer — This article is categorized for 3 broad sets of audiences. The first will be the ones that haven’t yet completed their first five years in the professional world. The second will be those who are in between their 5th and 10th year of vocation. The third though, are the ones who have a decade or more work experience. Let me call out right away that the audiences who may fetch the greatest value out of this piece of advice will be the first category and even the second to a large extent. However, the third category may or may not find it all that helpful. I say this only because it is mostly seen that the more time people spend at their work, the more rigid their perspectives about best practices become based on their experience and exposure to the external environment. With that said, if some belonging to the third category find this valuable, please feel free to utilize and/or share these recommended practices with the younger (by professional tenure) folks out there. Again, there’s no hard and fast rule that these things must necessarily be attained before your 5th year of work experience but yes, it is certainly more rewarding if achieved sooner than later. The objective of this article is only to have professionals gain a perspective into what are some of the key elements to attaining faster and sustainable growth in their career as well as fostering the foundation of becoming celebrated leaders eventually.
Now that we have the disclaimer out of the way, let’s dive right into what you are here to know. Do you remember your first day at work? Weren’t you thrilled to start working, do wonderful things at work and also start earning your livelihood/financial independence? Generally, that’s the emotion which most of us experience at that rather young age. Much to our surprise though, most people’s suppositions around how the work-life would be and/or how easily we would make a mark, stands busted within the first few weeks itself! This is the first time we realize that there are a plethora of factors that need to work in harmony before we can foster the foundation of a remarkable career. Here are 7 intangible professional assets that I strongly recommend one must strive to accomplish within the first five years of starting the career. Let’s look at them one by one.
- Personal SWOT Analysis
Not all of us necessarily land at the right job within our first job. According to a job seeker survey conducted by Jobvite in the US, 29% of workers have at some point left a job within the first 90 days, most often (45%) because the day-to-day role was not what they expected. Therefore, the personal SWOT meter must be always on so one knows their Strengths to keep building upon that so much that it becomes one’s passion. Knowing one’s weaknesses will be extremely helpful in not just identifying the areas that one needs to ameliorate, but also in giving it a conscious thought about the ways to overcome those frailties. Keeping an eye out for and grabbing opportunities one comes across and leverage one’s strengths will certainly keep you ahead of your competition. Lastly, single out threats or in other words, constraints or hurdles in one’s journey of success. By always keeping a track of your SWOT, you can make a better career choice at the get-go vs realizing it much later in the game and having wasted crucial time. Besides, nothing will serve you better than keeping an ‘always learning’ mode on. I strongly believe that once the student in you dies, the teacher in you dies! Hence, never ever give up even half an opportunity to learn something new.
2. Build Interpersonal and Collaboration Skills
One of the most crucial traits that every professional needs to have, is the ability to work in a collaborative manner with peers, seniors, downline and pretty much everybody in an organization. How you do it is simple, practice listening before speaking! Be considerate of others’ opinions and suggestions and at any given point in time, keep the team’s goal/interest at the core of your discussions/efforts. The first couple of years in your career are the right and arguably the only time for professionals to establish solid interpersonal skills or it becomes extremely challenging to develop later. Do know that interpersonal skills are the most (38%) sought after skills in leadership hiring as per Mettl’s Leadership Hiring Trends Report 2019.
Focusing on this sooner than later will certainly make your career ‘future proof’ from a personality perspective. Besides, a pleasing personality is not just welcomed but also extraordinarily helpful in building relationships with your stakeholders both internal and external.
3. Know and Ditch Your Comfort Zone
It is usually in the formative stages in your career that you develop aggression or complacency in terms of your work style which eventually becomes your usual behavior at work. It is therefore important to make a conscious effort to know what goals one is able to achieve with regular efforts then set higher targets for oneself and strive hard to achieve those. This way, within the first few years, you will have trained yourself to take up and deliver on more/challenging responsibilities which is what will be expected of you anyway when you start rising the higher rung in the leadership ladder eventually. Remember, all that you aspire for lies right outside your comfort zone — in the effort zone!
4. Strong Work Ethics and Integrity
If there’s one thing that is most commonly taken for granted by all of us is knowing what strong professional ethics and integrity really is. Be it rock-solid honesty, self-confidence, reliability, rational emotionality, positivity, adaptability and so much more, most people like to think that they have it all. I am here to tell you that this belief can be far from reality. There are enough such free personality tests (like 16personalities.com)and some paid and more accurate ones (like Birkman) are great too. The idea here is to validate our belief around how strong our work ethics, personality is and always keep working on areas that need betterment. This is a great way of ensuring that you uphold your personal and professional integrity.
5. A Workplace Mentor or Guru
I cannot stress enough on how crucial and extremely helpful can having a mentor or a Guru prove to be! If there’s just one single most crucial asset (out of all the ones I am recommending), you would rather build, it has to be this. While we might admire many leaders within an organization, they may not even know. Try to let this person know that you look up to him/her and would appreciate if they could mentor you on some of the areas of opportunity that you will have identified by following point#1 above. Once that relationship is established, wonderful things can follow and the best part is that it is mutually beneficial for the Guru as well as the student. The biggest advantage of having a mentor is the freedom to make mistakes with little judgment and tons of constructive feedback. This feedback mostly comes from their first-hand experience that you could leverage on without making too many errors thereby saving a lot of time, effort and sometimes money.
6. Build a Risk Appetite in Decision-Making
From making small and/or easy decisions that may not be of consequence in the grand scheme of things, to taking critical business calls that may have a lateral direct/indirect or remote impact on one or the other aspects of the business, decision making is an extremely vital skill that every leader must possess. The preparation of this trait, however, must begin in the inceptive years of one’s career. You will not wake up on a particular morning and find yourself to have become an effective decision-maker. This begins with first coming to terms with the fact that every decision will come with a cost and a value. The cost part is usually where an underlying risk exists and if you have calculated the risk and still believe that your decision can bring about the positive outcome you’re expecting, take the plunge! If you succeed, you know how you did it and keep it up, if you don’t, you learn! Either way, building that appetite for risk is essential to making effective business decisions. Once you have a propensity to be calculative in taking risks you are ready for taking on more challenging roles in your career eventually.
7. Learn From Failures
Keep your successes close to your heart and failures even closer! This is again something you’d better learn sooner than later. Often, failures are construed in a negative connotation and most humans have a natural tendency to dissociate with failures both in personal and professional lives. However, if looked at from a different lens, success and failure is just an outcome of the efforts that one makes towards attaining a certain goal. If you must attach yourself emotionally, it must be with the efforts and not as much with the outcomes as long as you did your best. If you indeed failed in accomplishing whatever you had set out to, do not walk away only with angst but do a post mortem of the situation and assess in retrospect what you could have done better to avoid that failure. Consult with some who were directly or indirectly a part of the scenario. Ask your mentor/guru as stated above for guidance and once you have an answer, resolve to do better next time around. By ensuring this in the initial few years of your career, you will have done away with the inhibitions usually attached with failures thereby grooming yourself into a more confident and prudent leader.
Some professionals do some of the above, a few do most of them and some don’t do any of these. The recommendation here is for the beginners to look at these 7 things holistically, build and utilize these assets in conjunction with each other and always have a sense of time around practicing these. Time is paramount in establishing a stellar career and it must always be looked at the constantly depleting resource that it really is. Thus, the sooner one attains their professional goals, the longer they’ll have to not just enjoy the positions/ranks and the perquisites thereof, but also have a chance to credibly contribute and share their learning and experience with the larger community.
If you know/think of other such intangible professional assets you feel are needed within the first 5 years of one’s career, please comment below!