Why do most People Fail to Expand their Career Opportunities?
The World is not revolving around you.
Do you think that you will hang around in this world, doing the things that you want to do only when you want to do them and leaving the things that you dislike or don’t want to do, to a later time in your life?
If you think that you will stay single until you see the world and have fun and then when you are ready you will find your dream man or lady, you are wrong.
If you think that you will spend more time with your kids after getting the promotion and salary increase that you are dreaming of and that your kids will be waiting for you, you are wrong.
And finally, if you think that you will focus only on your job and that when you say ‘‘I am ready to change my employer’’, you will find another better job immediately, then you are wrong.
Things don’t go this way in life.
Let me use ‘‘work’’ to give you an example of what I mean.
As an employee, if everything is moving fine between you and your boss, then you tend to focus only on your job. This means you work the 8 hours and after finishing them, you go back home or hang out with your friends.
And why should you focus on something else? The world is cool, and your relationship with your boss is great.
So, you stop growing yourself outside your company. You don’t go to networking events. You stop updating your online profiles. Furthermore, you stop educating yourself outside your current job. You stop researching the market to learn the new trends or the average salaries. And you do not even care about forming connections with people online and offline, or even about sharing your thoughts with others.
Why? Because you are not searching for a job, and you think that one day if you need one, you know how to find it. You close yourself in a box called ‘‘my job’’, and you convince yourself that by doing so you are ‘’focusing’’.
Ah, by the way, I forgot to tell you, do you know that as many as 80% of the jobs are filled through networking and even BEFORE they are even announced to the public?* (You will find some references regarding this point at the end of the article).
But what if everything suddenly changed in a second? What if your company started laying off people or your good boss left the company and was replaced by another horrible one or anything else? What if you found yourself under huge pressure and that you need to leave and to leave now?
At this moment only, you start running and doing everything fast under pressure.
You start going to networking events and job fairs. You start updating your online profiles and interacting with people online. And you start working on improving yourself and your knowledge about the market and the trends. All of this with one goal in mind, which is to find the best job for you as fast as possible.
But you know what? At this moment, you will discover that things will not move as fast as you thought just because you are ready and searching, and you will start regretting that you never did these activities consistently and during your calm time.
When I am consulting or coaching someone to improve his performance in his job because he wants to increase his salary or climb the career ladder, one of the foundations that we keep in our minds is the concept that ‘’we will build in the calm time so that we can leverage what we have built in the tough time’’.
And no matter if he is currently happy or unhappy in his job, we define growth areas, and we start improving his performance in these areas as fast as possible and also to make him gain more exposure. We work on getting him in the game and in parallel, we are preparing him for any surprises.
What does this mean to you?
This means that no matter if you are happy with your company and current job or not, you must educate yourself each day. In fact, you must set a budget for monthly growth.
You must update your online profiles and set 30 minutes per day for online engagement and to share your opinion and how you think with others.
You must appear in networking events and build connections that are based on mutual benefits and respect.
Furthermore, you must always research the market for salaries as well as the trends. You should do this minimum one time every three months.
And when you do this, you will be prepared any time for any surprises. You will form an unshakable character and confidence, and you will be dealing with your employer from the perspective that you are both partners in success.
Build during the calm time, so that you are prepared for the hard time.
References:
1- How Many Jobs Are Found Through Networking, Really?
2- 80% of today’s jobs are landed through networking
3- New Survey Reveals 85% of All Jobs are Filled Via Networking
