Tips for Building Your Career Path

Every successful career is built on solid career planning and preparation beforehand. Chartering a well-defined career path is a must to be able to direct your time, effort and money towards achieving the right goals and progressing towards the right direction. Without a clearly defined path, you will likely wander around mindlessly digging into whatever books you can read, attending whatever workshops you can find online and whatever job positions you are offered which ultimately culminate in years of your life spent on working for something that does not fully satisfy your passion.

Determine What Career You Want

Before building a path, you need to know what you're building it for. Making career choices is not the easiest, but it's definitely one of the most important life decisions you'll be making. Ask yourself what your true passion is. Is it in finance or business? Engineering? Web development? Writing? Regardless of what you decide on, be sure it's something you actually want to do for the long run. Your reasons for pursuing the profession should go beyond the short-term merits of a good paycheck or job stability.

Make it a Regular Event

Just like how your visits to the eye doctor and dentist are an annual event, your career path building should also be scheduled for regular checkups and adjustments. You don't want to do it too often since most career decisions do not materialize over the span of a few weeks or even a few months thus frequently checking up on your career progress will simply lead to inaccurate data and waste of resources. Instead, find a day or two within the span of a year where you can objectively look at the progress you've made, where you should be more aggressive and where you should perhaps back off a little.

Be Open to Changes

While you've already mapped out a particular path that leads to your long-term professional goals, don't think of it as a linear trajectory. Instead, be open to new situations and changes that happen while you're taking the journey. Be open to taking shortcuts or different roads as long as it is congruent to the big picture. For example, if you are looking to be a very adept full-stack software developer, you don't have to contain your opportunities and activities to a linear 4-year software engineering curriculum. You can always enroll in intensive boot camps and self-study your way to individual concepts that mesh together later on.

Be Observant of What You Do Outside Work

It might seem peculiar to examine activities unrelated to your work but, in order to progress continuously into your respective industry, you will need to manage your time wisely. Activities and hobbies that offer no help in terms of knowledge or skill should be forgone for more relevant activities. This does not mean you shouldn't have fun but to limit your leisurely endeavors to one or two hours per week.

A large percentage of society spends their lifetime not having any clearly defined direction. Be bold and wise enough to use the four tips mentioned above in order to avoid commonplace mistakes made by the majority of people continually updating their career path.

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