Create a Competitive Edge through Branding, Relationship Building, and Growth

Create a Competitive Edge through Branding, Relationship Building, and Growth No matter your occupation, in buchen to be successful in your career you need to remain cognizant of the business landscape where you are entrenched. Staying ignorant of your surroundings leads only to being left behind, so it is important to continually assess where you are and how you can recreate your competitive edge over your professional peers. In your trek to remain competitive and gain ground on your competition, consider concepts of branding, building relationships, growing, and maintaining your work/life balance. Like all buzzda sagst du wass, the word branding has become a bit overused, but the concept remains pivotal in creating a personal image that is memorable and leaves people impressed. But branding gains much of its value in making clear precisely how you are different from your peers and which skills y ou possess that makes you stand out among your competitors. Any self-marketing plan requires that considerable effort be expended in creating a fleshed-out personal brand.Beyond your outward image, creating networks of contacts is also vital to stay competitive, and the key is to focus more on the quality of your relationships rather than the sheer number of contacts you have collected over time. What you want is a group of people who can directly influence your career in a positive way and those who have the most useful feedback to offer. This may include customers, managers, and employees, among other professional connections. It is crucial to keep open communication channels, and build relationships with those who can impact your career.When you become complacent, or otherwise stagnant in your current station ,you lose a degree of flexibility and creativity that is necessary to continue being successful into the future. Being stagnant means putting too much focus on becoming entr enched in current projects and the other smaller crises that make up your day-to-day life. This affects your ability to remain open to change and accepting new challenges that require a sense of daring and creativity that lead to innovation. This effect dulls competitive advantage because it forces you into the crowd that you are trying to stand above. Continuing to grow means updating your skills, learning new technology, or even shifting your career altogether. The point is to keep evolving and remain open to new opportunities.Building a successful and fulfilling career is entirely reliant on balancing your work priorities with the other aspects of your life. But obtaining a work/life balance is not so much about equally divvying up your time so as to give each portion of your life equal time and energy. It is about finding the best combination of focus and to meet the dynamic demands of your work life and personal life without sacrificing your overall sense of well-being. It is i mportant to pay attention to where you are, where you want to go, and how well you are getting there. Once you understand your goals and what it is that sets you apart from the crowd and what you need to do in order to keep moving forward, you can start allocating your focus, energy, and time to standing out.

5 Career-Change Myths Exploded

5 Career-Change Myths Exploded 5 Career-Change Myths Exploded However,whats also beginning to slowly change is the expectation that a workerwill have one career for their entire life. In todays world, its possible you might start your career as a high-powered accountant and end it as a chilled-out tree surgeon. Massive forces are acting on the workplace e.g., greater independence and self-determination, globalization, automation, unprecedented levels of economic and corporate instability, etc., which means that very few career paths can be truly considered secure.What I mean to say is that we are moving into a career-change world soon, thecareer-changers will be the rule, rather than the exception. And many people will become multi-career-changers that is, many people will change careers multiple times throughout their lives.Themulti-career-change world is a new and untested environment for employeesand employers alike. As a result, many myths prevail that can hinder workers who are seeking to change careers these myths may also causeemployers to pause when looking atcareer-changer candidates.Therefore,I thought it would be useful todisprovesome of the myths surrounding career changes and career-changers. Doing so will help us build a healthier environment in the talent ecosystem.Myth No. 1 The Average Person Will Have Seven Careers in Their LifetimeThestatistic that the average person will have seven careers in their lifetime has been floating around the Web for some time now. However, this stat was never really plausible, and now it has been roundly debunked by many researchers. In my personal opinion, I would expect that the average person might squeeze in two or threecareers in a lifetime.Myth No. 2 You Cant Change Careers, or If You Do, It ComesWith aHigh Risk of FailureAlot of people view career changes in a negative light, but this perspective is not totally justified. Research from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) found thatsucce ss rates for career changes are astonishingly high. The institute found that 82 percent of people over 47 who tried to move to new careers were successful in making that change. The truth, then, is that you canchanges careers and if you do, you have a high chance of doing so successfully.Myth No. 3 Youll Have to Take a Pay Cut If You Switch CareersAccording to the AIER study cited above, sideways career changes are possible.The AIER found that, for68 percent of career changers, pay remained the saatkorn (18 percent) or increased (50 percent). Thirty-one percent of courage changers took pay cuts.So, while pay cuts are areality for many career changers, they are not the norm in fact, career changers who saw their pay decrease were in the minority.Myth No. 4 You Are Too Old to Change CareersRemember when the AIER found that82 percentof people over the age of 47 successfully changed career? I also want to mentionresearch from the AARP Public Policy Institute, which found that63 percen t of older workers who went through long periods of unemployment found jobs in completely new lines of work.The point here is that career change is an option open to anyone, no matter their age.Myth No. 5 Needing to Change Careers Is a Sign of Bad Career PlanningSeveral pieces of research show that our personalities change over the course of our lives. And as your personality and values change, its only natural that your career expectations and needs might also change.So, needing to change careers is not necessarily a sign of bad career planning or failure in you current career path. Rather, deciding to change careers can be an acknowledgement of the natural change in your personal priorities and preferences as you age.