The Millennials' Guide to Building a Career

Experts predict that by +2020, Millennials will make up about 35% of the global workforce, while Generation Z will make up another 24%. As our generation takes over the workforce, we must ask ourselves: How many of us are truly career ready? More than a decade in school hardly prepared me for a 50-year career. While we were able to practice writing our resumes and role-playing for interviews, not much was done to prepare us for the road ahead.

Job satisfaction, professional development and stability, increasing income, the opportunity to work abroad - these are just some of the things we want in our careers. We know what we want, but do we know what we have to do to get it?

If you're in your first job, I hope you find this guide helpful and informative.

Build a career around your talent

Those : technicalwriterhq.com

You may have heard the advice to “do what you love.” Many young people consider pursuing a career based on their passions or building a job based on their hobbies because they think it will be easy to go to work if you know you are doing something that one loves.

This is generally bad advice. Add to that the pressure of building a startup and getting results as quickly as possible, and the joy of pursuing a hobby or passion can disappear pretty quickly. Leave hobbies as they are - something you do on the side to enjoy yourself. Don't put pressure on your hobbies to perform.

Instead, discover your talents - skills or abilities that you have a natural aptitude for and that allow you to be better than average at a job, even if you don't necessarily like the work. Talents are what you can do to achieve more results with minimal investment of time and resources.

Consider talent-market fit

Talent-market fit refers to how exceptional your talent is to a company and how much the industry demands and is willing to pay for your specific skills and talents.

Ideally, you should have talents and skills that set you apart from other candidates on the market. Factors to consider when it comes to talent:

• Competence: Are your skills difficult to acquire and master? Can they be transferred to other industries?
• Certifications and awards: Can you get formal training and certifications for your skills? Can you participate in competitions or hackathons?
• Growth and development: Are you able to learn complementary skills easily and quickly?

As industries grow and shrink, demand for talent can also change quickly. Factors to consider for the market:

Industry/Vertical Growth: Is the economic sector or industry growing or shrinking? Will more or less money be invested?

Job growth: Is there more demand for these features? Is this role slowly evolving into other roles?

Career progression and mobility: Are you able to see career development for your desired role?

Develop a long-term perspective

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, believes that since most careers are relatively linear, it is important to develop a career that has a compounding effect:

"You don't want to have a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty years. As your career progresses, each piece of work you do should produce more and more results." .

Avoid depending on others for your career. Your HR managers, team leaders and mentors can contribute to your career, but you alone must take responsibility for your development and learning. You should not assume that everyone will make decisions in your best interest.

Be proactive in the early years of your career and invest time in identifying technical gaps in your skills and how you can acquire complementary skills to increase your efficiency and competitiveness. To do this, seek out mentors outside your company to learn how another company of a different size handles certain challenges, or simply research new skills you can acquire to advance your career.

Finally, how you think about your career is very important. Your mindset needs to shift from the nine-to-five mentality (task-oriented mindset) to a long-term perspective (goal-oriented mindset). If we are myopic about our career and only focus on checking off our daily tasks, we may not see where our career is going or understand how those tasks will contribute to our career in the larger context.

Be clear about what you want about your Workplace satisfied, and work toward maximizing your satisfaction with a goal. Once you have set a sufficiently ambitious goal, plan how you will achieve it. A long-term plan should help you see daily tasks not as terrible obstacles, but as small steps that will lead you to your goal.

Consistently deliver outstanding performance

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The ability to consistently produce excellent work is an underrated virtue. Some people take too much time to achieve a big breakthrough and then become overwhelmed or disappointed when things don't go according to plan. Even if we achieve some success with a large project, we may find ourselves burnt out and exhausted immediately afterwards, unable to maintain the same pace over a longer period of time.

It's important for young professionals to do the little things right first. If we don't do the little things right, we won't do the big things right. Small tasks done well give us the momentum and confidence to tackle many more tasks while expanding our expertise in the field.

Everyone Profession requires the dedication and sacrifice of countless hours to perfect and master it, getting the little things right every time and improving every little detail. While work-life balance is important, investing time and energy into meaningful and fulfilling work can be a source of great joy.

Invest in yourself

There are two specific areas where you should invest your time and energy - your portfolio and your network. These two areas will pay off many times over in the long run, creating valuable personal capital that is transferrable to other companies and probably even industries.

Portfolio

Portfolios aren’t just for designers. As you build expertise through various projects you have completed in your current job, you should ensure that you create appropriate documentation and create a portfolio. You can use the following format to create an entry for a past project.

Start with a brief introduction to your company

Bumblebee is a San Francisco-based fresh produce marketplace, a mobile app platform that collects products from farmers markets and growers and delivers them directly to our customers.

Explain the problem

Our marketing efforts stagnated. We were working on a tight budget to acquire more users, but due to a few cases of customers being sent spoiled fruits and vegetables, the churn rate for our marketplace had increased. There was an urgent need to build trust among our users in the quality of our fresh products.

Explain your approach to solving the problem

As CMO, I led my team in an activation campaign by organizing the largest farmers market in Palo Alto. We flew in some of the largest producers in the country with their best products. We wanted to show potential users the quality and freshness of these products and show them how Bumblebee can help bring these goods to their door every day.

Present the results of your solution and highlight key metrics to demonstrate your impact

Through our social media and influencer campaigns, approximately 25,000 residents visited our farmers market and our vendors raised a total of $79,500. Through this campaign, we were able to not only attract top growers to supply Bumblebee, but also more than 300,000 organic social media impressions and 45,000 new app downloads. Due to the successful campaign, the marketplace's churn rate has also fallen significantly.

Your future clients or employers may be interested to know which clients you have worked for or which companies you have worked for, but showing them how you approach problems and how you measure results will help you establish yourself as an effective problem solver and critical thinker distinguish.

You should also consider working on side projects. If you're a developer, designer, or marketer, you can boost your portfolio in a short amount of time by taking on side gigs, developing niche ideas, or even organizing community events.

network

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The structure of one network is more than just collecting name cards at a business conference or chatting at networking events. By building meaningful relationships with people in the industry, you can discover more resources and opportunities in the form of partnerships, career opportunities, and even speaking engagements at industry events.

A great way to build meaningful relationships is to start with the people who are closest to you professionally - your colleagues. Always strive to help people solve their problems and support their development. You can tactfully challenge their ideas and help brainstorm, but you should definitely avoid helping them with their work when they could do it themselves. You want to be known as the one who cares about the people you work with, not as a pushover.

A final tip for building your network is to never eat lunch alone. The lunch break on Workplace is a good opportunity to get to know your colleagues and employees on a personal level. To build and maintain meaningful relationships, you should know their communication habits, hobbies, passions, and aspirations. If you're leading a team, taking time to get to know your team members personally is a good investment, as this relationship can help reduce work-related friction and improve collaboration.

Building a career is not an easy undertaking. In my personal opinion, although it can be extremely difficult to build a career, hard work and talent pay off and the sooner we work hard, the more benefits and rewards we can accumulate over time.