As we progress through our careers, many of us are looking for ways to keep growing in our roles and pursuing that exciting promotion. Not only is it great for your personal growth, but it will help keep you motivated and engaged in your current position. If you’d like to make yourself more promotable, here are four ways to do it, no matter where you are in your career.
Stay Agile and Adaptable
Changes and challenges are part and parcel of being in business. I’m fairly confident that you and your organization had to make many shifts due to COVID over the past couple of years. It doesn’t take a global pandemic, however, to bring about change. You’ll constantly face these challenges over the course of your career. If you’re able to bring the right attitude and resiliency to those changes and adapt to them instead of allowing them to fluster you, your managers will certainly take notice. This ability to hit the curve balls of business will make you more promotable in the long run.
Take the Initiative
When I say “take the initiative,” I don’t mean volunteering for new opportunities or pieces of work that may come your way. Take the initiative to invest in yourself. If you happen to work at a company like Sparq that offers various opportunities for additional training, then take advantage of them. We have McKinsey-curated leadership courses, classes through LinkedIn and MasterClass and we also offer training through Pluralsight, so there’s a host of opportunities for individuals to invest in themselves. What your managers will see as you begin to invest in yourself and grow those new skills is that you’re someone who’s interested in your career and taking initiative. These investments in your personal balance sheet of skill attainment will no doubt provide you the opportunity to see that return on investment.
Find a Great Mentor
I strongly encourage you to seek out those leaders and mentors in your organization that you’d like to emulate or learn from. What I can assure you is that if you put forward the effort and reach out to them with a sincere interest in learning from them, those people will be happy to give back. Especially if you demonstrate that you’re acting on their advice and putting that into practice. These individuals will become invested in your success and I guarantee that they’ll be eager to help you fulfill your career goals and aspirations.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Feedback
Early in my consulting career, I realized that I had a lot of gaps in my skillset. What I also discovered is that if I waited around for my annual review to solicit feedback for improvement, I’d lose a lot of valuable time. I began to ask for feedback early and often, even for fairly straightforward activities like a meeting that I was leading. How did I do? What things I could improve? I realized that this gave me a head start on working on those skills and gaps that I really needed to fill.
Making yourself more promotable isn’t something that just happens overnight. It takes discipline, self-reflection and some level of vulnerability, but speaking from experience, those are all qualities that managers look for when promoting a member of their team. Treat your career as many small steps of continuous and intentional self-improvement and the rewards will follow.
About the Author:
As Chief Executive Officer, Monty Hamilton leads the executive team and drives the overall strategy for Sparq. Monty is responsible for leading the strategic direction and the growth of Sparq and is leading the team in their goal to launch 10 new high-tech hubs over the next few years. Each facility will have 200 colleagues in low cost of living, high quality of life locations. He is a sought-after speaker on the outsourcing and domestic sourcing topic and has recently been featured on CNBC, BBC, NPR radio and at various industry conferences including IAOP, Gartner, Digital Georgia and others. In addition, recent articles depicting Sparq’s innovative outsourcing model have appeared in Business Week, CNN Money magazine, CFO magazine, and CIO magazine.
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