Are you looking to grow in your current role or explore new opportunities? Consider some of these best practices in career advancement. The Trojan Family is cheering you on as you take steps on your career journey and continue to learn and grow with excellence. We’ll dive deeper into the various topics covered below in future posts.
Conduct a Self-Assessment: Know yourself. Identify your strengths. Embrace change and opportunities for improvement.
- Understand your values.
- What’s important to you?
- What parts of your current role do you enjoy?
- What parts of your current role would you prefer to do without?
- In what types of work environment do you thrive?
- What type of work energizes you?
- Are you living your values?
- Take some career assessments through USC resources or externally, e.g., LinkedIn, StrengthsFinders. (We’ll have more on this and other topics in other articles soon.)
- Update your résumé/CV/portfolio.
- Develop your personal-professional circle.
- Deepen your network.
- Expand your network.
- Be proactive about connecting with people in other areas, units/departments, schools, industries, and associations.
- Seek feedback.
- Be open and seek candid input from your supervisor, peers, and/or trusted colleagues and partners as appropriate.
- What is your current reputation in the workplace? What are you known for?
- What are some blind spots?
- How do you want to be seen?
- Trust yourself, know who you are, and understand what you need.
- Be honest as you reflect on your experience and skills.
- What actions are you currently taking to develop and shape your personal brand?
Identify Your Job/Career Target and Set Goals: What do you hope to achieve, why, and by when? Who and what may be helpful to you? How?
- Develop challenging yet reasonable, actionable goals for yourself.
- What skills, education, training, or additional resources do you need to accomplish your goals?
- Be specific and set measurable goals.
- Create timelines and break down large goals into manageable pieces. Set milestones to monitor your progress.
- Consider working with an accountability partner.
- Celebrate milestones along the way.
- Set stretch goals.
- Periodically reevaluate your goals, reassess your status, and adjust your goals, timeline, and scope, as needed.
Expand Your Skill Set in Your Current Role or Unit/Organization: Strengthen your own toolkit. Update practical skills, both the soft and hard skills. Seek out opportunities to engage in professional development.
- Visit USC Employee Gateway (https://employees.usc.edu/) for information and links to the USC Careers site, TrojanLearn, coaching and mentoring programs, and more resources available to staff and faculty.
- Search online and connect with others in similar roles (or in more senior level roles) to identify the types of skills needed to be successful in your role today and for growth in the near future.
- Enhance your skills (e.g., leadership, communication, project management, strategic, analytical, technical) that are most applicable to your role/field.
- Discuss with your manager and others about your interest in professional growth.
- Take on leadership roles.
- Volunteer for additional tasks.
- Help colleagues with some of their projects and tasks.
- Manage up.
- Help others to also realize success.
- Be a helper, a problem solver, and a go-to colleague.
- Reach out to and learn from leaders in your field.
Explore Opportunities in Other Areas: Learn from and connect with others. Continue to learn, reassess, reflect, grow, and thrive.
- Visit USC Employee Gateway (https://employees.usc.edu/) for information and links to the USC Careers site, TrojanLearn, coaching and mentoring programs, and more resources available to staff and faculty.
- Search USC’s Workday and USC Careers to explore new career opportunities.
- Use TrojanLearn to access a variety of USC trainings and LinkedIn Learning courses on 1,000+ subjects, ranging from turning your passion into a career, networking, working remotely, avoiding burnout, caregiving, and achieving equity to career management, crowdsourcing, marketing, artificial intelligence, data science, design visualization, and animation.
- Reach out to and learn from peers and leaders in the area you may want to shift.
- Conduct informational interviews to learn more about some of the daily tasks, advantages, disadvantages, and skills to be successful in the area you are seeking.
- Discuss with your manager and others about your career interests and professional pursuits.
- Help others with their career exploration and achievements. You’ll learn with them and more about yourself, too.
- Practice reciprocity and contribute genuinely to your progress along with that of the Trojan community.
- Explore, connect, learn, grow, and Fight On!