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Success means different things for different people. It could be having massive perusal success, being financially stable, raising a family, or simply being happy. Or it could mean that you have cultivated the perfect career for yourself and are flying high at the top of your game.
If career success is your aim in life, then you need to be priming yourself for great things as early as possible. Even if the career development you seek is years down the line, you need to put in the prep work today to give yourself the best chance of success.
Know Your Goals
It’s not enough to say you simply want to be at a certain point by a certain age; you need to know why you want that position and what you are aiming for when you get there. Say you have trained as a nurse and you want to move through the ranks; you need to identify if there is a specific area of nursing you want to practice, e.g. emergency care, pediatrics, geriatrics, or mental health, for example, and look at why you want to do this and your goals. This can help you to define your path from here to there and knuckle down or make it a reality.
What Qualifications Do You Need?
Coming back to the nursing point, you need to know what qualifications you need to support career advancement. Sure, you might have a general nursing degree, but do you need further, more specific training and education to land a job role in a particular nursing niche? Do you need to retrain? Get a Master’s Degree? Or just get the relevant experience under your belt. Whatever you need, you need to know and plan for this to be a part of your trajectory.
Get Noticed
It’s no use flying under the radar when you have goals in mind. You need to get noticed for all the right reasons. The people in the know need to know you exist, and those with the hiring power should be on your radar and vice versa. Make connections within your industry, show your current employers what you’re capable of, get active on LinkedIn to integrate yourself in the industry, and sign up for a job search site in your area of expertise or where you want to end up to see the type of roles available, who is hiring and what you can expect to need once you are ready to make a move further up the ladder.
Strive for Excellence
A bad reputation is more challenging to shake off than you might imagine. Do you need to strive for excellence and be your best? Making mistakes can cost you long-term; people have long memories. So, own up to what you do, put your best foot forward, and make sure that when people think of excellence in the industry, they think of you. This can be going above and beyond in your existing employment, innovating and reaching out to established leaders in your field, publishing studies in journals, writing blogs or informative articles in industry newsletters, investing in your education, and paying attention to the small details.
Whatever applies to get you to your end goals, do it, and do it as well as you possibly can.
Career success depends on how much you want something and what you are willing to do to get to your ultimate positions and the top of your ladder. Be good, be consistent, and strive to be better than anyone else to help you succeed.
