How to Become a Professional? - Habits for Professional Growth

A new year presents a fresh slate. Just like birthdays, when you’re celebrating another achievement around the sun, a new year presents you with a psychic restart.

Quickly, you can be renewed into a new person and you will learn habits of professional growth. You can start having a clean, establish an exercise regime, or you can make this the year where you devote yourself to your career.

Many students begin college right after completing high school. And even the ability to even attend college is a huge change, this usually means that, as a teenager, you are making decisions that could possibly affect the trajectory of your life.

Ahem, student loans. With this logic by the time you’re looking to start or grow your career, you might not know how to apply your English, Legal Studies, or Photography degree to the workplace.

It might be unexpected for you to learn that you already have all the tools you need. Front movement in the workplace can be as simple as recording your mixture of hard work and your soft skills.

From there, you mix them together, and voila! Professional growth is yours! Well, maybe it’s not that easy.

If you’re seeing to put good, contemplative work into your career path, you’ll catapult to success. This year, let’s talk about our careers reframing how we look at our past experiences, and how we use them to build our future. You guys can kill (in a good way!).

Below are some essential habits for professional growth:

1. Schedule Your Life

To advance your career, make  lists of such things as:

• What are the things you want to achieve in the next year
• What you have already have achieved

Create your “dream list” first. Where do you want to see yourself in the coming year? Do you want a raise? Do you want to acquire a complete assortment of new skills? Do you want to change jobs entirely?

Once you’ve settled on what your goals are, then go for the second list. The second list is formed of the things you’ve already accomplished. While constructing this list, think about how the things you have done can feed into what you want to do with your goals.

It might seem like you don’t have the Suitable experience or skill set to achieve a new aim. For example, possibly if you want to go into a managerial role in the current year, but you seem like you have no experience. The point is, you apparently do have a consistent experience.

Think of things you’ve done in the past. Do you plan alumni events with your college friends? The great thing about existent skills is that they are most likely movable. It is usually a matter of context.

2. Scale your Goals

How to become a professional? You can map it out by your goals at work. Maybe your goals are on a less scale, like a software upgrade or the chance to systematize better in the new year.

Your goals can be perfectly lofty, like spearheading a completely new department in your foundation environment or going after a big promotion.

Whatever your goals may be, always make sure to prioritize them. Which ones are going to be easily achieved? What is a reasonable timeline in which to achieve these goals?

Are there particular steps you need to take in order to reach this goal? Whether you need to build your leadership skills, refresh your writing skills, or learn an entirely new piece of software, The New School’s Open Campus most likely has a course or certification to help you out.

3. Keep Mark of Wins

A great way to motivate yourself and recognize your true worth at work is by tracking your wins. This is something that might not come naturally to you. Instead of shouting our victories from the rooftops or hanging from the rafters in joy, we give ourselves a sly, knowing smile and move on.

Think about keeping track of your wins on a monthly or weekly basis. Write them down. If the wins are due to a team effort, then describe how you were a key element of the overall success.

After a while, these wins will communicate a particular skill set, whether it’s leadership, project management, or technical skill.

4. Examine Losses

Just as you keep track of your successes, also keep track of your losses. Possibly your “loss” is a single mistake you made. Maybe that’s a huge mistake, like a missed limit or a lost client.

I am a strong follower that you learn more from your losses than from your victories. If you start tracking your losses, you’ll be more cognizant of why they are happening, and how you can problem-solve for the future.

5. Expand your Ability Sets

If you identify your gaps, you can then take steps to fill them with the requisite skills. This can seem daunting (and expensive), but that’s not true! You don’t need to accrue a monumental amount of debt.

You can likely acquire the skills you need to level up by taking an online certificate in something like digital design or data visualization.

Without having a load of enrolling in time-intensive and costly graduate degree programs, Open Campus allows you unparalleled elasticity to learn exactly the skills you need to do well in your present environment and to go after your dream job.

6. ASK Ask as many questions as you can

You can open all your lines of communication in order to ask any questions. Examine particular changes, forthcoming projects, and about continued education favorable circumstances.

Asking questions alter you into an engaged employee, someone who is hard-working to learn more and progress within her company.

As a perk, when you need to ask for help, you’ll already have a rapport with several people in your workplace who are willing to lend an ear and help out.

8. Learn to Negotiate

Learn how to get what you want in your skilled career. This will involve some bargaining, which is a priceless skill for upper management. Before ever asking for anything, make sure to arm yourself with research, numbers (if applicable), and possible positive outcomes.

Part of the negotiation will come from being able to present confidently and convincingly. Make sure to master this skill.

9. Listen Sincerely

Listening skills are crucial in the workplace. Aside from being polite (!), listening—really listening—will clue you into things that are going on that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious.

Attend to what management is telling about the next semester. Listen to what battles your development team is having. Listen to where marketing needs more support. When you have a 360-degree understanding of what is happening (and how to fix it), you’re more likely to be promoted from within.

10. Trust your Gut

Guess who knows the most about you? I’ll give you a hint— it’s a person who hangs out with you constantly, who knows your every move. It’s you. Listen to yourself. If something doesn’t seem right and that feeling is delayed, it is worth approaching. If you are unfulfilled at work, cope up with your workload, or battling with management, listen to what your heart and body are telling you

11. Say Yes to "Displeaseure Zone"

This is something you have made a huge effort to do over the past years. How many times have you said that “I can’t do that” when asked to participate in something outside your comfort zone? How many times have you avoided something that terrifies you? Start saying yes to everything you’ve before said no to.