Here are some things I learned from other people I’ve worked with:
1. Always have an idea of what you are going to do next. Always think one step ahead and know what your next job will be. “The moment a coach is hired, they’re one day closer to getting fired” is a sporting analogy that is often used when a new coach is hired by a team. You know that even though they may have signed a 4 year contract, if their team under performs for long enough, they might get the boot before the 4 years are up.
Don’t get too comfortable in your current job, keep your resume updated and always keep your eyes and ears open. Specifically keep them open for what’s going on inside your current employer and keep them open to the market for people with your skills and experience.
2. Think about establishing multiple streams of income. These days it’s hard to believe there is such a thing as a job for life and realistically there probably isn’t. Certainly not if you’re working for someone else since there are always others making decisions that can affect you that you simply sometimes can’t control. These days it’s also easier to gain multiple streams of income than ever before. The Internet alone has opened so many doors for you to not only promote and sell products and/or services but in fact to literally sell to the entire world if you so choose.
Running a business on the side, investing, setting up a website(s) to earn extra money or doing some paid consulting work in your chosen field are all areas that could offer a new or extra stream of income so that you’re not solely relying on your job.
3. Don’t become dead wood. Back on August 14, I referred to the dead wood story that I’d witnessed earlier in my career where a guy I worked with had overstated his own importance and during a major layoff, was surprised to learn he was part of it.
Getting complacent in your current company and position can be, well comfortable, but it can also be a problem if layoffs come around and your company is looking to only keep the motivated, upwardly mobile staff and they don’t consider you one of them. Don’t be overconfident and know your value within the company.
4. Just because you don’t think something is a big deal, doesn’t mean other people will feel the same way. In my first job out of university working for a major telecom provider, I was tasked with launching a monthly industry-specific newsletter that would cover 12 major industries for our company’s sales force to help them better understand each industry and to target solutions to them that would reflect their business needs.
Within several months of starting to produce these sales guides, I started to get recognition within my division and even in other divisions regarding them. I unexpectedly got publicly recognized at the next quarterly meeting for our business group for my work on the newsletter and one morning, was surprised to see my phone ringing with the company CEO’s name on the caller ID. She was calling to get delivery of the newsletter every month and wanted to ask me a few questions about the design and content.
I never felt that the newsletter was really a big deal and was not an overly difficult task for me to complete yet many others in the company obviously didn’t feel the same way. I started to become known as the guy who produced this great newsletter and found myself being stopped in the hall or elevator having people ask to get put on the mailing list.
5. Don’t necessarily do what other people always tell you to, but don’t be afraid to listen. I once read that there are three ways to look at a person: there is the way they see themselves, there is the way other people see them, and then there is the way that they actually are.
Before I became a recruiter, I had a sales manager who asked me one day if I’d ever considered becoming a recruiter. He had just been to a networking event the night before and had met a couple of recruiters. He felt that my personality and skillset would lead well to a successful career in recruitment.
Funny enough, I had actually wanted to learn more about the recruitment business and started doing some research on the subject based on my managers recommendation, contacting recruitment firms to speak with them and asking them about their jobs and the work they did.
I didn’t become a recruiter because of my manager’s suggestion but his suggestion to learn about the industry based on the skills he’d seen me exhibit certainly helped.
