The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey, focused on monitoring the trends within the next generation of leaders, came out with interesting results: on an average, Millennials expressed little loyalty to their employers. 66% of them were planning to leave their current jobs while placing their individual interests and values ahead of the goals of the organization. The people of the current business world have ambitions beyond profit. They are after productive career development, and they’re making it happen.
Who doesn’t want to reach success by climbing up the career ladder? We live to achieve! We need to transform ourselves throughout life, and we want to evolve. That transformation is not easy, though. It needs hard work and a specific plan for reaching the goals we defined.
Why We Need Productive Progress
Have you ever felt like you’re working somewhere you don’t belong? It was great at the start. You faced new challenges, saw new faces, and adapted to the office environment like a pro. As months and years went by, you felt like that organization exhausted your capacity. When you don’t face new challenges and changes, any job can easily get boring.
Many people wonder: “Do we really need career progress? Do we have to work hard for it?” Yes, and yes! According to business author Tony Robbins, people have six basic needs:
- Certainty
- Uncertainty
- Significance
- Connection
- Growth
- Contribution
Did you notice the last two points? Growth and contributions – those are the needs that keep pushing us to career progress.
What You Can Do to Take Your Career to the Next Level
First of all, you need planning. You can be relaxed and accept one job after another, just to see where it takes you. That approach may turn out to be exciting, but it’s not the most certain way of achieving success. Plans and commitment, on the other hand, have more power than you can imagine.
Then, you need hard work. Career progress doesn’t happen easily. You have to prove your value to your current employer, so they will give you chances for growth. If you decide to look for a job in another organization, they will make sure you performed well on your previous position. However you see it, hard work is a constant in this equation.
However, there are tools that can make your journey easier; mainly because they help you develop great skills with less effort. We suggest you try 5 of the most effective ones.
5 Tools that Bring You Closer to Career Success
- I Done This
When you climb up the career ladder, you can’t miss on developing two important skills: teamwork and project management. Each organization would love to have a powerful individual among its workers, but even people with strong personalities need to fit into teams. That’s where I Done This gets into the picture.
This is an awesome tool that makes the coordination and collaboration within teams as easy as it gets. Each member can provide quick status updates on their progress, so you’ll use that feedback to manage the team more successfully. You’ll use the app for note-taking and task management, but for evaluation as well. The tool will provide you with easy-to-digest reports based on the daily check-ins of your team members.
When you work with other people, you cannot allow yourself to fail because of someone else’s mistakes, and you mustn’t make mistakes that would cost the team a successful completion of a project. You need to be on top of every situation, and Trello is the tool to help you with that.
This is a simple, lightweight app for project management. The interface is organized in the form of boards, cards, and lists. You can use those forms to make to-do lists and set priorities for the team. The app is flexible, so you can easily move the tasks from one list to another.
For example, you can create the following boards: In Development, Testing, In Revision, Ready to Go, Done. When you have few tasks, apps, or some kinds of products in the development stage, you can monitor their progress and move them across the boards as the team makes progress.
Do you always know where your documents are? Can you easily find a particular document when you need it? You can use great word processing software that allows you to complete work from any device and save it on the cloud. Thus, makes no sense for you to keep using MS Word and stuff your computer with all files you need and don’t need.
Google Docs is a great tool you can use for crafting text documents, sheets, forms, and slides. It’s an online tool that supports collaboration, so you can invite your team members to make edits as you work together on a project.
There’s another important skill you need for your career development: knowledge of foreign languages. Why is learning and knowing foreign languages that important? Well… that’s a rhetorical question! Everyone knows that if a person can speak at least a few foreign languages, he can be considered a great specialist. This is an incredibly useful skill in an employee of any company.
In case you don’t know any foreign languages yet, Busuu will definitely come in handy. This is a huge social network for those who aim at acquiring new language skills. There you will have a chance to have great practice in writing, reading, listening, and training your speaking with native speakers from all around the planet.
Is there any need for explaining how important LinkedIn is for productive career progress? This platform serves as your virtual resume, which you present to potential employers and recruiters. The best thing about LinkedIn is that when you’re an attractive candidate for jobs in your niche, you won’t even have to apply to jobs; the recruiters will come to you.
It’s important to complete your LinkedIn profile as diligently as you possibly could.
- Think of an attractive headline; you don’t have to stick to the scheme of writing your current company and job title. You can list your specialty – that’s a great way to become attractive to recruiters.
- Don’t forget to include a professional photo. Remember: people are visual creatures. When a recruiter connects the information to a face, the impressions will last longer.
- List your biggest achievements in the summary. Make this part very easy to read, and support it with images, links, or documents.
- If you have troubles creating the perfect LinkedIn profile, you can hire a professional writer to do that for you.
- Once you have a great profile, you don’t stop there. You need to make connections.
- Consider writing LinkedIn blog posts; they will launch you as a desirable candidate.
- Join relevant groups and be active in the discussions.
There’s no career that brings you to the next ladder without hard work and commitment. You need to develop skills, and you have to be a very productive worker. Thanks to the 5 tools we just suggested, the journey will be easier for you.
About the Author:
Jessica Freeman has been a journalist and a freelance content writer for 6 years now. She is a professional in her niche and prefers using creative approach while focusing on the sphere of education, career, and business. Also, Jessica often contributes her content writing pieces to Australian Writings company.