Achieving Your Dream Job: 4 Ways You Can Improve Your Career Prospects
We spend the majority of our young lives, essentially, preparing for work. Through school, college and university the end goal is always to get a good job at the end of it all. When you’re young, people often ask ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ and as adults, we ask people we meet ‘what do you do for a living?’ It’s because what we do is so important, as well as allowing us to be productive members of society it can define who we are. Plus earning money to live is always going to be necessary. If you’ve wound up in a job with no further career path or you hate what you do, why not make a change? There are some practicalities to consider, but working a job you’re passionate about will give you so much more satisfaction and will allow you to generally be happier in life. Here are a few things to consider.
Research Your Industry
Staying up to date with your industry as much as possible is vital for improving your career prospects. Regardless of whether the companies you want to work for focus on weed delivery or stocks and bonds, you’ll need to know everything about it.
If your dream job is in another industry, then that’s the one you’ll need to focus on. You’ll benefit in more than a few ways once you do.
The main focus of this would be knowing where and when to look for new job opportunities. You could also increase your chances of getting a promotion in your current role. That’ll primarily be seen once you’ve started to use your knowledge to do your job to quite a high standard.
As easy as it is to say you need to research your industry, it could be much harder to do. It can also be relatively time-consuming. Perhaps the most notable way is by subscribing to newsletters and publications that focus on your industry. Trade papers can also be a well-recommended option.
Speaking with colleagues and other professionals in the niche can also be an appealing way of becoming more of an “expert.” Being able to pick their brains could be much more valuable than you’d think.
Once you’ve taken this approach, you can identify trends, skills, and other areas that might be vital for achieving your dream job. From a career standpoint, it’ll make you look like an authority on the subject. That’ll be quite an attractive quality from a potential employers’ point of view.
Set Some Goals
Deciding exactly what you want to do and setting some goals will help to keep your focus and allow you to work out what you need to do to achieve them. Is there a specific job role you would like to work in? Would you prefer to start your own business and work for yourself? What alternative options are there which you would be happy working in if your first goal doesn’t work out? You could set a one, three and five-year plan to help you stay on track.
Improve Your Skills and Education
A career advancement or complete change is usually going to need more education. So going back to study is one way you can help yourself to get closer to where you want to be. Even if you already have a degree, you could progress onto a masters- you don’t even have to go to university to study these days. For example, you could look into masters in school counseling online programs if you wanted to go down the psychology route. You could look at online law courses if you want a legal based career, medical or science for professional healthcare roles- the list is endless. Once you’ve decided what job you want to do, work out which degree and type of course you will need to study. Other ways you can improve your skills is by doing voluntary work in the field you hope to work in, or going on training courses.
Keep an Eye Out For Opportunities
It’s useful to keep a good career network both on and offline, so when opportunities crop up, you’re the first to hear about them. It might not be a direct job offer, it could be a training program, a chance to improve your skills, transfer somewhere else or move up in your current role. Sign up to job site notifications for the sort of roles you’re hoping to start out in. Sometimes a leap of faith is all it takes to get you where you need to be!