Career Smarts: Straight Talk and Three Tips For Survival & Success

Success in life is judged with calendars not clocks, and with the unprecedented ways our world is changing, there are new ways to build the foundations for that long-term success.

These foundations must take into account two of the biggest challenges to maintaining your economic viability over the long haul. Firstly, that your professional future will continue to be affected by the globalization of work through technology; and secondly that economic recessions come round with regularity every seven to ten years, further compounding the opportunities for economic dislocation.

So looking forward, in a world of work where the only constant is change, the most important professional skills you can possess are the skills that insure your employability and economic stability. Here are three commonsense tips that will greatly improve your long-term odds for survival and success.

Establish Professional Connectivity

You need to stay current with the issues facing your profession and how they will impact your job and your professional future.

To do this, join LinkedIn and become actively involved in your online professional community. Simultaneously, join the local chapter of a relevant professional association for offline connectivity at your local community level. Do both and connect with other professionals who are serious about their professional future.

Professional Competency

Because technology will continue to change the nature of all jobs, a big part of professional competency is, in fact, technological competency: you must make ongoing professional education an ongoing priority.

The Things You Never Knew

The things that no one ever told you were important: resume writing, job search tactics and learning how to turn job interviews into job offers are really the most important professional skill sets you can possess. Why? Because they are the skills that keep a roof over your head and food on the table.

These three commonsense ideas can become the building-blocks of a successful professional future, because with the knowledge and connectivity they deliver, you will be able to conceive and implement a coherent long-term career management plan, for whatever changes the next decade might bring.

When you have the skills necessary to find work, and a wide network of professional contacts for introductions and referrals you are ahead of most of your contemporaries. If these skills are tied to an intelligent career management plan, your life will be more secure.

Let me help change the trajectory of your life for the better,

Martin Yate, CPC

34 Years in career management,
NY Times bestseller, 14 books, 62 foreign language editions

Let’s keep in touch!

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