While CAREER GROWTH focuses on your long-term improvement and eventual promotion through positions in your chosen field including your salary, title and reputation, CAREER DEVELOPMENT focuses more on short-term growth that include skills, abilities and credentials. This involves choosing a career, improving your skills and advancing along a career path.
It’s a lifelong process of learning and decision-making that brings you closer to your ideal job, skillset, lifestyle and work life balance. Tis achieved in stages that include exploration, establishment, mid-career, late career and decline.
CAREER CHANGE on the other hand involves the use of skills you gained from one profession and applying them to a completely new career. There are 3 key steps you can take to find success anywhere you are.
Step 1: Be open to and ready to Change.
When it comes to careers, change is the only constant. Career change has cache. Changing Jobs can be a strength and an asset in your professional development. It can show that you are flexible, adaptable, resilient and that you have created problem solving abilities. Change is growth, an opportunity to learn. You can do it and most importantly, enjoy it! If you want to.
Step 2: Embrace the experiences, Ditch the titles.
Today, a successful career is not known based on a single job title but the process of diligently developing and quickly adapting a set of skills to answer life’s challenges. WHAT ARE THE SKILLS THAT YOU CONSISTENLY USE IN EVERYTHING YOU END UP DOING? Therein lies your strength, your path to success.
By embracing the experiences, you expand your employment options and can better enjoy the journey.
Step 3: Make meaningful connections.
Ask questions, seek advice, let the world know what you can and want to do.
YOUR GUIDE TO MAKING A SUCCESSFUL CAREER CHANGE IN 2023
- Map out your goals, identify short-term milestones along the way and give yourself reasonable timelines.
- Explore your interests, perfect and polish your personal brand to boost your career search.
- Identify job titles related to your passions then focus on expanding your network while continually developing your skills.
- Most of all, don’t be scared or disheartened by the search for your new career.