It’s true that in life, in our society, we are all our own personal brands. This might not be for the sole purpose of creating profit, of course. If you take time to care for your appearance, or are actively dating, or wish to be a good person, you are implementing the work necessary to help you move forward and become better, to establish your own ‘brand’ as part of your own perspective. This is healthy and good
Of course, this is felt each day in how we curate our personal brands from a career perspective, and from there, what decisions we make going forward. Taking an attitude of self-improvement helps you become the very definition of an ever-expanding asset and investment.
So - how can you continually refine your skillset in this manner? How can you make sure that no matter if you run a business, are employed, or working freelance, you are continually moving forward and getting better at what you do? These questions are worth asking - so let’s ask and answer them:
Orient Your Learning
It’s important to learn and grow, we know that much, but understanding how to orient your learning is also a worthwhile skill. We must understand just what we need to practice, which principles we need to learn, and what essential qualifications we must get in order to better understand and pursue our career.
So, let us say you work in marketing. You wish to adapt to the new, social-media led efforts that will help you gain further exposure and maybe even help you conform your own talents to your own projects going forward. Learning about SEO and how it corresponds to worthwhile marketing copy can be a massive benefit as part of this approach, and thus you may decide to take online courses while reading into this habit and practice in order to better understand it.
Orienting your learning can help you ensure that your approaches are worth it, because there are almost infinite paths you could begin educating yourself in out there. Staying directed, focused, and also parallel to your career goals is important. Before you start, you may take the time to understand just where your ambitions are best understood. For instance, if you hope to become a writer in a field you love, learning the principles and practices of journalistic enquiry may be a fantastic approach, and will further nourish your potential working skillset. That’s a positive step to take in the right direction.
Research The Evolving Market
Researching your evolving market is an important use of your time. It can help you keep your eye on the future, focused on the forecasted potential ahead of you. What does this mean? Well, industries change. Societies change. Markets change, and skillsets change.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn a craft. It just means understanding how that craft may change over the years. Even chefs, people who may seem to be static in their creative approach after mastering their efforts, must adapt to the current line of thinking and forecast the tastes of their guests.
This is why the best academic institutions such as in Suffolk, grant you the means to study MBA’s that are not only geared for the current understanding of business discipline, but also how those trends might change in the future. This provides you with a means to balance yourself against the evolving workplace, and if this year has proven anything, it’s that planning for the evolving workplace should be a hallmark of your forward ambition.
Consider Educational Possibilities
Consider the educational possibilities that may help you move forward and better yourself. For instance, what degrees are available in your field? How might they be divided? How might they be understood? Where do they lead, and what creative opportunities are out there for you because of it?
Understanding that there are several paths forward might motivate you to undertake this task. Life always feels vague and uncompromising when we can’t see a way through, and so understanding just how many choices are available to you can feel amazing. For instance - do you have any eligibility for student finance funding? That could help you train or retrain as appropriate. Can you potentially use online tuition to help you learn new skills and enter the workforce? Moreover, has COVID changed the shape of your industry? How might you move forward from that effort? These questions can help you in the best manner, and also help you avoid a perfunctory means of planning your career without any real sincerity.
Apply Incremental Progress
Apply incremental progress to your plans. This can make a massive difference going forward. You don’t have to achieve everything in one day. In fact, perhaps today you can register your instance in a certain after-work training programme. Maybe you could contact and ask questions about public speaking training.
Perhaps you can use your educational credits leftover (or as part of) your military training to reskill after leaving the forces. Little measures like this can help you take a tentative step in the right direction. Sometimes, even reading case studies or keeping up with the news of a certain market can help you more appropriately understand it, and mold yourself to it. Refining your skillset means understanding how your skillset applies to the world at large, and you can only learn that, deeply, with incremental progress and little efforts that stoke your curiosity.
Network & Learn From Others
Of course, no man is an island, and that means no professional is an island. Even businesses that pride themselves on their autonomy will need to rely on suppliers, and other professionals to help them from time to time. Networking, then, is an appropriate means of refining your skillsets and widening your expertise.
It might be that you’re interested in taking a particular career path, an offshoot from your current employment. It could be that asking a friend in a department how you might move forward. It could be that you wish to strike out on your own, and so you ask a prior networked contact if they have any advice. Just watching the stories of others in your professional field can help you learn several lessons. From how they conduct themselves to how assertive they are in interviews to how they perform when crunch is the norm, learning and networking can often make a massive difference - if only if it teaches you what NOT to emulate.
Stay Passionate
Remember that while the technical requirements and personal skillet required of any career path can be dense, that under all of this should be passion, or at least interest, in your chosen career. Stay passionate. Don’t be afraid to allow this passion to help inform your action. For instance, an event organizer might find that curating events for artists they love provides them with much more joy than simply running corporate award shows. This may not earn them as much money, but could make the working process much, much easier to deal with.
Staying passionate helps you take risks, work hard, remain enamoured by your chosen career, and ultimately makes getting out of best in the morning much easier to deal with. That’s a positive part of your skillset to refine.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily refine your skillet, and do so in positive ways. It may take a little time to achieve, but we have nothing but time.