5 Cs For a Successful Career
Posted on June 06, 2021 by Aina Raj, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
As a career coach I have found these skills very relevant and many leaders and executives whom I work with, live by these principles.
Career advice is often very easy to find, and almost anyone who has worked for a while will give you a success mantra. Most of the advice provided by professionals is derived from their own experience and field of work, which could be redundant in your context. For one reason, with the rapid digitization, there is a complexity and mass disruption added to the jobs. With the democratization of knowledge in the form of Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn, it is much easier to seek advice from professionals in your field. You are not just surviving in your job but thriving for excellence.
A set of advice is not universal, and you continue to absorb facts and knowledge to build a great career. However, there is still some uncommon yet practical advice to adopt in this rapidly changing economy.
As a beginner when I started my career a decade back I found these 5 skills valuable as a beginner and I follow them even today.
Curiosity
Curiosity is more than just the need to know things. It keeps your mind active and puts you in the position of doing your job in a more creative way. Curious people ask questions and learn from others. Even if they fail, they analyze their failures as they are keen on knowing the reason behind them. This increases their chance of excelling in their careers as it indicates their interest in progress.
Commitment
Are you in the habit of making commitments only to break them in the near future? Do you plan to join a gym, only to chicken out after a month? Do you keep missing deadlines for submissions?
High performers and successful people get their work done in time, which enhances their ability to perform the major tasks. When you get things done, you earn the trust of your peers and managers, which puts you on a higher playing field. By inculcating the commitment mantra, you are building resilience and a no-nonsense aura. You are what you do, and this commitment execution will attract responsibilities and opportunities towards you.
So how to go about building the nature of commitment? It is reasonably easy. All you got to do is form a habit of making small commitments to your co-workers, peers, and even to yourself. Drag yourself to the gym to honour the fitness resolution you took on the New Year’s and start finishing your tasks way before deadlines. Combining execution and opportunity opens up the highway to success for you.
Collaboration
Collaboration is quite tricky as this generation is raised in an atmosphere of individuality. The changing education system also ensured that children were ranked up and rewarded for standing out against their fellow peers. However, it is interesting to note that collaboration is fundamental in all human beings, and collaboration is how we survived in the past.
Collaboration is the foundation to building networks and rising up the ladder. The ability to be a part of the team eventually determines who is being hired to be in the project and the relational intelligence gained with collaboration helps you navigate through various projects. The market is an unstructured environment where you need to learn interpersonal skills for nurturing yourself. After you are exposed to the corporate world, it becomes fundamental to collaborate to understand your potential role in the development.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort that you make at building yourself and learning from your failures. It improves the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of your work. It helps you stay ahead of your peers, and even if you are doing well, it is always essential to find what more can be improved to perform better. A natural drive to keep improving your skills goes a long way in keeping up in a competitive landscape.
Communication
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that communication is the most important tool of all. Written and oral skills are quite necessary to sustain in your career but what people always forget is the need to master the art of communicating about yourself. Promoting your skill and value by communicating with your peers is how opportunities are created. You need to brand yourself in a way that communicates what you are truly capable of. This communication skill can be developed by self-exploration which is possible by finding yourself a career coach.
Communication is easy to practice but hard to get right, and one for the most important skills to move up the career ladder. Communication is highly essential to show what you can provide to your team and how they stand benefitted from your models and skills.
Conclusion
Because each situation is different and each career is unique, there is no fixed template for success. In the end, all we can do is prioritize building the skills and mindfully prepare the 5 Cs through standardized testing and self-exploration. The ability to keep it simple and to work on things that count is the way to guide yourself through the path of success.
