6 Crucial Steps Towards Getting Your Dream Job
It’s something that you’ll have been running through in your mind like a film for years – your dream job, with all of the challenges, perks and intrigue that comes with it. It matters not which sector or industry you’re excited to enter – and what position you’re aiming towards before you can say you’ve achieved your dreams – there is absolutely no reason why you can’t go out and seize that wish, making it a reality. There are, however, some incredibly important steps to take on the path to this dream. Your dream job won’t fall into your lap. The six steps outlined below will help you achieve your dreams as quickly and professionally as possible.
Get Qualified
This one’s all about your early life, your youth and your education. From high school right through to your college and university years, you’ll be spending a great deal of time within the system of education that aims to make an employable person out of you. The problem is, so is everyone else. If you’re setting your sights high on a job, you’re not going to get it by having the same qualifications and education history as someone else. You need to set yourself apart. Here are some ways in which you can do this:
- Take up a number of extra-curricular pursuits at school to show the depth of your character and the breadth of your interests.
- Make sure that you perform as well as possible in all of your graded assignments – as you never know which job role is looking mostly at your past grades.
- Use every spell of spare time that you have to invest in your education when you’re younger, including attending summer school.
- Look out for adult education opportunities, like workshops, conferences and classes in certain disciplines.
- Look online for university courses you can study from home, like RMIT’s online MBA degree which you can complete in your own time.
The tips above are to do with your educational history and the ways in which you can leverage this information to help you reach a successful moment in your career. The below tips concern your business acumen, your professional profile, and your individual drive.
Your Professional Profile
From the point at which you become an adult, you begin to be seen as a professional human being with a great capacity to use their skills and their learning in multiple job roles. The sooner you realize the difference between professional conduct and the kind of behaviors you’re leaving behind from your youth, the sooner you’re going to be taken seriously by seniors in your schools, university or company.
If goes without saying that you want seniors to respect you, for your abilities and conduct to raise eyebrows and earn approving nods in board rooms and meeting rooms across the places in which you work. These impressions, however small, can lead to greater opportunities later in life. It’s paramount that you seize your chance, in each and every job you perform, to impress your managers. These are the people who might promote you, or mention you in industry talks, which can only go to increase your professional worth.
Professional Networks
The other side to this professional conduct is to build your network – the group of people that you’re able to turn to for jobs, advice assistance and skills – all of which are important elements to your achieving success and finding that top job that you’ve always dreamed of. How to build a network, though? Well, here are some pointers:
- Attend work social events and talk with managers about your aspirations
- Schedule meetings with clients, customers and managers you see as influential
- Ensure you’re presenting as a well-dressed and serious professional in your day-to-day life
- Work on your networking skills at workshops, conferences and meetings
These tips will help you become a known individual in your given industry. On top of these attributes, it’s also important to build and maintain your online professional network. You can do this by building a LinkedIn account – popular amongst ambitious businesspeople – that’ll help you make more connections and build your endorsements – online.
Produce Work on the Side
As well as the work that you do in your day job, something that can really set you apart from the pack is the work that you produce on the side, for yourself. This might be bits and bobs of freelance work, or it might involve you setting up an online business at which you slowly gain the skills and understanding that you’ll be able to transfer into your later operations as a manager or a company CEO. These skills cannot be learned without experience, and this sort of experience is something that it’s incredibly beneficial to have under your belt before you begin more senior roles.
Be Ambitious
When it comes to actualizing your dreams, you’ll find that the majority of the time, it’s about ambition. You might well be very well qualified for your dream job – but it’s that extra mile that you should be willing to run that’ll set you apart from the rest of the pack and that’ll make you a shoe-in for the top jobs in the world. Ambition is your greatest asset here – and it’s not something that you can fake. Make sure that your colleagues and managers know exactly how high on the ladder you’re looking to climb, and go the extra mile as much as possible in order to turn heads everywhere you take yourself in the business world.
Reflect and Learn
Finally, even the most competent of people make mistakes. Bearing this in mind is an important way to encourage personal feedback, by reflecting on how you’re performing in your job and what you’d like to perfect, alter or work on throughout the coming weeks. This constant evaluation – coupled with a deep sense of worth and ability to improve on your performance – is something that’ll almost guarantee your upward mobility in industry. It’s only by making mistakes that we can learn, and it’s only by reflecting on these lessons that we can truly understand what went wrong and what we need to change to make a better attempt in the future.
These six tips are the pillar of your future success – so pay close attention to their advice and strive to make your ambition work for you in achieving your dreams.
