The best way to improve your career is to think about all the career paths/jobs that are accessible to you given your current job /education. Then talk to people in those career paths about their path to that job. How those people got to their position will help you craft a 1 month project where you build the skills that will help you follow the career path of the people that have the job you want.
Analyze the jobs you could work towards getting, pick one of these, talk to people who got this job about how they got that job. Use this specific info as a guide to work on a 1 month project where you get closer to this job.
Career Capital Theory states that the traits for a fulfilling job are rare and valuable. Thus, basic economics says that to earn those, you have to have something to offer in return (rare and valuable skills).
You want great autonomy, impact, and connection to people. You focus on how to build up skills with unambiguous and desirable value in the marketplace.
Focus on a few items that make the biggest impact.
You can’t just interview someone to get good advice. Need to ask the right questions. This fallacy applies to our internal thinking about how to improve our lives/career. It’s easy to come up with a plan of action that seems satisfying and seems plausible
You need difficult objectivity when thinking about how to improve. Athletes at the pro level don’t just come up with training regimes on their own. We have coaches who are experts with decades of experience studying, teaching, and training.
It’s much harder to come up with a system or plan that will actually work (and takes more work).
if you are one of the few who has the objective mind to go through the difficult process of assessment, then you will reach a blue ocean where you are able to seek vast improvements to your desired skills.
You don’t need a large amount of passion to begin the process at getting good at something.
How do I make a decision about leaving job vs. doing more in existing job? People tend to think in terms of match philosophy — specific job match. A better match implies the more we will enjoy the job. You are always going to be able to come up with potential jobs that will be a better match. This is a recipe for anxiety. Traits to love your job are not connected to a specific match. It has to do with more general traits. The four most important traits are: Autonomy, Mastery, Connection, Creativity. These traits lead people to feel passion towards their work.
What are your current career capital? Can you use that right now to reshape your position to have more of this in your work? Good opportunities in you current job to put in work and initiative to build up your career capital in current company? If there are good opportunities to do that and your current job will give you a lot of leeway to invest that into reshaping your working work, then stick with it. Making a shift really only makes sense if you think of your options. You may need to shift into another job or career that will pay off more. You can develop skills faster and put them to work to use them as leverage. This is one reason to switch. The other reasons to switch is because of deal breaker clauses. If the work is against your morals, switch. If the people are terrible, switch. If there are limits to your ability to acquire skill, switch.
Take small steps to explore new ideas, to learn new skills. Build those skills, then from this vantage point, you can set a new vantage point going forward. I experienced an evolutionary process where I was examining the situation I was in and working on key skills — becoming a better writer, running an online business, building information products. This developed over time. From what I’ve seen, those who have a very successful career all have a similar philosophy. It’s not a rigid philosophy about doing exactly X. It’s also not the opposite of throwing your hands up in the air and having no clue what to do.