Two Things To Do In December To Boost Career in January

This is December and very soon, many companies would be scaling down operations for Christmas. While you are in it, make time and do the following before January 3, 2019 when operations begin to ramp up again:

1. Think how you can do your job better. Look at some of the challenges you have faced in 2018, and use your experiences to think critically what you could do better going forward. Put those new ideas in maximum of two pages. As the New Year kicks off, share in mid-January with your supervisor. Make sure you present it as a recommendation, and ask for his/her inputs to help finalize the roadmap.

The key is showing and demonstrating that you have learnt some things in 2018, and you want to improve certain things to get better. If you do that dutifully, you will get respects. Process improvement must not come from the CEO alone; you do your work, and can help that firm get better in what it does through excellence at job.

2. Write a professional article (ensure nothing proprietary is included) and get approval to send to a trade/professional magazine or newspaper. Let us say you are working in a bank as a Database Administrator and you ended up having a good article on database administration published in one of the leading sites in tech, you have added more juice to that career.

I am always amazed when people say there are Marketing Executives in a company and they have no single article credited to them. To scale your knowledge and get many to know what you do, it is important you have contents in your name while complying with company policies. While in Diamond Bank as an entry level staff, I was publishing monthly in Nigerian newspapers and our HR liked it. One that was well received was on banking competition and strategy, drawing insights from the Art of War by Sun Tzu. I must note that (most other) people discover you from your writings more than any other way, unless you are on the big screen or already a senior executive.

All Together

I want to wish everyone a great December and also challenge that we make efforts to use it to review our personal and professional careers. Do not walk into January without a clear plan on how to fix some of the things that did not work well in 2018. Doing that requires examining some key things in 2018 and then committing to take action where necessary, to fix them, and advance.

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