The best path toward upward mobility in your career is to take advantage of growth opportunities as they arise, and the best way to gain access to these opportunities is to plan your career with them in mind. When you take this approach to your career, you give yourself the best possible chance at contributing as much value (and receiving as much compensation) as possible for the value contributed by your skills.
But career planning may not necessarily be as simple as it sounds. What should you account for when you go about this planning process?
Regardless of where you are in your current career path, the steps involved are roughly the same. You need to consider the types of jobs your skills make you a valuable fit for, ways you can expand those skills in a manner that makes you a more marketable candidate, and connections that may give you access to the worthwhile career advancement opportunities you’re looking for.
In this blog post, we’ll examine each of these steps more closely to give you a more detailed understanding of each of them and how they might translate into an expanded capacity to grow in your field.
There’s a substantial likelihood that many or most of the skills you rely on regularly in your current role could translate to other, higher-paying positions. Many people who leave their current positions or career paths do so with the intention of switching to a different one, and a significant percentage of these people make this move to increase their income.
If your planned move involves similar responsibilities as the ones you handled in your previous role, you may find this switch to be a relatively painless one that increases your earning power and advances your place within your overall field. Taking this approach could also open you up to opportunities in completely different career fields that offer greater growth potential than your current one.
Finding a field with sufficient growth opportunities to suit your desires is the first step toward improving your upward mobility capabilities, but once you’ve done so, you need to determine which new skills and certifications are typically needed to bring workers in that field to the next level. While your current set of skills may be enough to improve your earning power in a different position, they may not always be enough to take you as far as you’d like to go.
Consider, for an example, the difference between an accountant and a CPA. An accountant without this kind of license lacks the same level of earning power and growth potential as one that does. A CPA, on the other hand, has access to a wider range of opportunities and a greater amount of higher-paying ones. This kind of distinction can be found in many different career fields, including law, medicine, software engineering, and more.
Even with the right skills and credentials to your name, opportunities for career advancement come primarily from the people you connect with. A partner or other high-ranking member of a major organization in your field can be your way into a position that acts as a first step along an extensive, lucrative career path.
Finding the right people and the right ways to connect with them, though, may not seem like a simple task, especially when you’re entering a completely new career field. Industry events, educational institutions, and other standard settings where people in your field meet may prove helpful for finding key contacts that can help you grow.
Are you looking for new ways to advance your career? Talk to an upward mobility consultant from Nineteen88 Strategies and learn more about how you can find the right path forward to increase your earning power. Call directly at 703-712-9987 or use our online contact form to schedule a consultation.
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