From my experience, in order to get what you desire you need to follow the following points:
1. Fix in mind what you desire to achieve in the short-term and long-term
2. Determine what you want to give in return in order to achieve those goals
3. Establish milestones (definite date) in order to reflect on your progress toward them
4. Structure your plan with straightforward steps of how you plan to achieve this
5. Write out this plan on something you can see to be aware of it constantly
6. Put the plan IN THE ACTION
As a student, you are not exposed in taking important decisions regarding the academic life. Everything is straightforward: you need to follow teachers’ guidelines in order to succeed in achieving the desired results. For most of us, once the academic life is finished, we lack a clear direction of our professional life. We all wish to rapidly develop ourselves in an industry that allows us to do this.
The same case was for me. During my exchange semester I started to apply to find something where I can rapidly grow. After some time I received different offers in energy sector, automobile and consulting industry. At this moment I faced my first challenge in taking a decision of where I want to work. All the offers were giving me the chance to develop some valuable skills. The only problem was me. I pursued two ways for taking this decision. One way was by informing myself about the company, benefits of the position etc. from different websites. Once I started I was overwhelmed by the amount of data available on websites, which made me to be more confused about the decision.
The second way, I wanted someone to approve my future decision. For this matter my twin brother was there for me. Explaining him my situation, he advised me to go for consulting in our home country. What happened here was that he favor my statements. I told him a lot of perks what would happen if I would come back to my home country and work for the firm that I got the offer from. Without being aware of, I offered him a biased speech of what is more confortable for me.
Right now, applying a self-evaluation moment concerning my “blind decision”, did I follow some of the steps stated above? Well, not really. But why was this the case?
Firstly, I lacked someone to give me a direction. I lacked honest feedback in order to know what are my strengths and weaknesses. Over a year in the professional world, I started to develop a sense of what I am good at. I think if I knew earlier my path was different.
Secondly, I lacked a structure to develop myself. I was doing everything and nothing. More exactly, I was involved in NGO’s, being an entrepreneur, organizing some events in the region and ended to be employed by a big four firm. Quite random, isn’t it?
Once I started my career, I was expecting a high amount of work as well as to discover how different industries operate. This is what I got. I improved my knowledge in different industries working some good amount of hours. In terms of decision-making, my expectations were to act more independent, getting my hands dirty with some data driven decisions. I did not expected to be so dependent on frameworks but this is accounting in the end.
The lesson that I learned? Get a clear idea of what skills you want to have in 5 years from now and work for them day-by-day! Don’t get your gut feeling to entirely control you!
To conclude, all I want to convey through this article is that if you desire something in your career, you need to work by giving something in return. Don’t procrastinate the time to develop yourself.
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