4 tips to make space for career growth this year

Did you decide to focus on any career growth improvements this year?  I like to use the turn of a new year to reflect on the past year and think about the year ahead, and I usually include a career goal in my plans.  But like a lot of New Year’s resolutions, it’s easy to lose steam on those career growth goals fast — so nowadays I try to proactively find ways to keep the momentum up.

Here are 4 tips that have helped me over the years:

1. Choose 1 specific goal to focus on right now.  When I think of everything I want to get better at, it seems impossible to narrow down the mind-boggling list of options!  But I’ve found it’s most important to just pick one thing and get started.  After all, I’ll likely want to get better at my whole list of improvements — but the sequence usually doesn’t matter!  So why not just get started at getting better at something, instead of wasting time identifying the perfect place to start?

2. Be clear about what progress looks like.  It’s tempting to keep career goals really high-level, like “I want to write more.”  But we’d never accept that sort of goal for a product because it’s too hard to know whether we’re on the right track and what to do next.  Instead, it’s helpful for me to identify and write down specifically what it will feel and look like to be successful, eg, “I’ll publish a short post every two weeks in Q1 and feel proud even if no one else reads them.”  I generally share my goals with my manager and peers so they can help hold me accountable and cheer me on.

3. Remind myself that growing my skills helps my team today.  With the constant influx of urgent, necessary work, sometimes it feels selfish to focus on my personal growth! But it’s been helpful to reframe that — after all, how can I help my team tackle harder problems unless I’m growing my skills? I try to remind myself of how investing in myself will help my team today, whether it’s because I’ll be better able to solve specific problems the team needs or just that I’ll have more energy and creativity every day.

4. Operationalize the time to invest in growth.  The biggest reason I end up falling behind on my goal is that I just can’t find the time to focus on it — my calendar gets filled up with meeting requests or urgent work.  So nowadays I set aside an hour or two on late Friday afternoons.  That time is otherwise underutilized (who tries to schedule a heavy-duty review then?) so I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing core team time.  Then I can use that time to take the next step on my personal goals, which re-energizes me to focus on work tasks again.

I’ve found that weaving a constant thread of something I’m learning into my standard work routine has been great for my energy.  What are you working on in 2024?