Enhancing career development is imperative and a lifelong process. Career strategies are behaviors, activities, of experiences designed to help people meet career goals. Individuals make a conscious choice of the type of investment they are willing to make towards meeting their career objectives. Career enhancing strategies and tactics, such as developing career goals, growing through continuous learning and self-development, and capitalizing on strengths and building a personal brand, result in the greatest chances of achieving personal and professional success.
Develop Career Goals
Setting career goals is a significant component of performance improvement. A career goal describes a desired career outcome that an individual aims to attain. The goal is accompanied by an intention to accomplish the outcome. Career goals are not job-specific but represent the type of work experiences individuals hope to achieve. Consequently, they can be conceptual goals or target job goals. Conceptual goals focus on the position’s attributes, which must be compatible with an individual’s talents, needs, and values. Target job goals outline the specific jobs that embody the desired attributes (Sessa & London, 2015). Therefore, meeting a target job goal leads to the achievement of a conceptual career goal.
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Developing career goals goes a long way in advancing a career. Individuals who develop specific and challenging career goals are committed and motivated to work hard to achieve the desired outcome. Moreover, career goals precede the identification of suitable strategies to attain the outcome. They also provide feedback on how effective individuals are in directing their efforts. Career goals must be specific, measurable, realistic, and must avoid negativity. Individuals can share their career goals with friends, colleagues, and managers to challenge themselves and ensure accountability (Sessa & London, 2015). Consequently, developing career goals helps propel individuals to accomplish them, thus improving individual performance.
Continuous Learning and Self-Development
Individuals should keep growing through continuous learning and self-development, which requires the self-directed, proactive investigation of emerging perspectives, approaches, behaviors, and steps necessary to evaluate and improve performance. Continuous learning can be in the form of a formal course or casual social learning. To keep growing, individuals must have an open, curious, and non-judgmental approach to differing opinions. Moreover, they must demonstrate self-reflection and solicit performance feedback from others. Personal reflection and feedback help individuals identify challenges and seek growth opportunities. Another behavior that encompasses continuous development and learning is using information sources, such as publications and professional organizations, to identify appropriate learning areas. Individuals must show interest and pursue learning activities to meet self-development or learning needs (Sessa & London, 2015). Continuous learning and self-development ensure perpetual career growth and instil confidence in one’s skills and abilities. The additional training, education, or skill development helps people achieve career development goals.
Personal Branding
Another career-enhancing technique is capitalizing on individual strengths and building a personal brand. Personal branding is a marketing effort that people adopt to promote themselves in the market. Personal brands refer to an emerging or well-known persona who is the subject of marketing, inter-personal, or inter-organizational communications. Successful personal branding requires individuals to map out their strengths and best brand attributes. In doing so, they develop a mark that expresses and communicates their skills, personalities, and values. For individuals to build a personal brand, they must consent to relevant opportunities to demonstrate their brands. They must also network to ensure they create a household name and create opportunities to become well-rounded. The message individuals share must be consistent. Moreover, good communication skills are indispensable in personal branding since they influence people’s perception (Khedher, 2015). Therefore, building a personal brand that capitalizes on individual strengths is a proactive way of controlling career development.
Conclusion
Career enhancing strategies and tactics result in the greatest chances of achieving personal and professional success. Some effective career-enhancing strategies include developing career goals, growing through continuous learning and self-development, and capitalizing on strengths and building a personal brand. These strategies set individuals apart from the larger market place and propel career development.
References
Khedher, M. (2015). A brand for everyone: Guidelines for personal brand managing. Journal of Global Business Issues , 9 (1), 19-27. https://search.proquest.com/openview/66b7cbedaf404d27914628ffa468bbb4/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=39974
Sessa, V. I., & London, M. (2015). Continuous learning in organizations: Individual, group, and organizational perspectives . Psychology Press.
