5 Easy Steps to Enhance Your Chance to Snag that Promotion 

Do you ever feel like you aren’t spending as much time as you could on your professional development?  It may be the case, in fact, that you’re not spending any time at all on this crucial cornerstone of success, outside of the actual work you do every day at the office.

Many of us find it hard to spend energy on actual career enhancement, especially when we’re already so busy doing the work for which we receive a paycheck. But it’s very important to focus on professional development opportunities separately from your daily tasks.

You will find that it’s often these extra endeavors — spending time and money to attend and present at a conference; going to regular industry meetings; enrolling in workshops to learn new skills — that can be the difference between moving up in your career or remaining stagnant.

The Perks of Professional Development

When you’re trying to be superwoman (i.e. being a star employee, wife, and mother all at the same time), you might cut out these “extras.”  How can you possibly find time for them?  What should you focus on?  But professional development doesn’t have to be an impossible dream.  By regularly setting aside a small amount of time and focusing on the effort, you may find that making professional development a part of your routine isn’t as difficult as it seems.

Here are five tips to help you impress your boss and become a leader in your field without getting exhausted:

Make Career Development Bite-Sized
Michael Melcher, author of The Creative Lawyer, advocates spending twenty minutes, each morning, on career development.  By setting aside such a manageable amount of time for each day, you make it more likely that you’ll actually do it, instead of throwing in the towel because it takes too long.  And by having it on your schedule, you make it a part of your routine – i.e. a habit instead of something you have to work to remember.

Figure Out the Specifics for Your Industry and Rank
If you haven’t spent much time focusing on professional development up to this point, you may  not have a clue what you should be doing.  Ask a mentor or colleague in your particular field if they have any recommendations – e.g. writing articles, attending conferences, taking classes, etc. Once you know what is suitable for your current professional level, and will be most helpful to your career, you can start focusing on how to make it happen.  Then make a list of all the possibilities.

Be Smart about Your Choices
You may decide that you want to attend regular trade association meetings.  Or to start writing a monthly article for your industry’s most well-known publication.  Maybe, instead, to present at an industry conference every year.  The important thing is to choose activities you think you will enjoy and excel at; by selecting something you actually want to do, you’ll vastly increase the chance that you accomplish it. (That’s not to say you shouldn’t eventually pick things that you aren’t necessarily drawn to.) But in the beginning, you’re more likely to succeed at creating this habit when you choose something you actually want to do.

Be Smart about Your Choices, Pt. 2
Remember, when it comes to professional development, slow and steady is better than fast and over. So be sure not to commit to too much at once: if you try to do too several projects simultaneously, your day-to-day work will suffer, you’ll struggle to get things done, get overwhelmed, and never want to do professional development again.  The point is to make this an ongoing part of your career.  Don’t crash and burn by taking on too much right away.

Track What Works
By keeping a record of the time you spend on professional development, and the benefits (like promotions, new clients, or new expertise) that result, you’ll learn which activities are most worthwhile — and which aren’t actually helping you to develop.  Then you can focus more on the truly beneficial professional development activities, and let go of those that turn out to be less fruitful.  An added bonus: by recording your activities, you’ll also have a very useful account of your hard work at becoming an expert in your sphere, which you can use to build up your resumé, or as support the next time you ask for a promotion. Employers want employees who are serious about their careers, and making professional development a priority shows that you are willing to go the extra mile to be the best in your field.

Making professional development part of your routine is an essential part of advancing your business persona. By following these tips, you’ll find that career enhancement is not only doable, but enjoyable: after all, you will meet many people along the way whom you would have otherwise missed.  And you might be getting that promotion in no time!