What Values Do You Bring to Work?

Finding a job is easy. Succeeding in it is the real challenge.  In the last few days I met people who have all the right opportunities to make it big but failed to do so on the account of their failure to capitalize both on the opportunity and their abilities.

This happens when we fail to acknowledge the importance of what we do and why we do it. The "why" part of the last sentence gives us a sense of purpose, a motivation to give it our best, without which all we'll see is the amount of time we spend at work and the financial entitlement for those spent hours.  We fail to account for our contribution. In fact we might not even want to talk about results, just hours spent or a semblance of effort. The "whys" represent or manifest our values.

Cast A Wider Net

If you want to catch more fish, you should go where they are and then cast a wider net. If you can't do both, you'll be in for a lot of frustration.

If you want to catch the big opportunities that come your way, you should prepare for it by increasing the size of your net so to speak. Widen your net by broadening your knowledge, improving your skills, maintaining a positive attitude and removing obstacles that stand between you and your dreams.

How much of these have you done? How far are you willing to go?

Sometimes, it's not the lack of opportunity that causes us to fail, it's our unreadiness to take them on when they come along.

10 Skills You Need to Succeed in Your Career

Here are some of the skills that I believe everyone who is serious about moving up in their career needs in order to succeed.

• Customer Care - No matter if you are in the front lines or not, you have customers. They are either inside or outside the organization. Your success depends on your ability to serve them well and build a strong relationship with them. Reading up on customer service concepts and practices, attending seminars and possessing a customer-focused attitude should help you acquire this very important skill.
• Problem Solving and Decision making - Being able to identify problems and being able to recommend or initiate the application of solutions is a valuable skill that bosses are sure to appreciate. The higher you go up in the organization, the more you'll need this skill.  Read up on topics like continuous improvement, Kaizen, Business Process Improvement or Re-engineering or Six Sigma. 

Of Love and Work

One of the works we do as recruiters is to separate the grains from the chaffs, the men from the boys, the ladies from the girls the haves and the have-nots, the diamonds from the coals. In the years that I've been involved in this work I have observed some patterns that separate great candidates from the mediocre ones. Is it their pleasing personality, their ability to articulate, their dilligence or is it their high IQ? I say not. This is of course not to say that these qualities do not come in handy. They do, but they are not the differentiator. You can have all these but if you don't love what you are doing your success becomes limited.

To say that you love your job  is much more than paying lip service to it. A spouse for example believes it when he/she is being loved not because of what is heard but because of what is seen and experienced.

You can tell if a person loves his work because s/he invests in getting better at it.  I'm not talking about just pursuing continuous education here. I've seen too many people who completed advanced education but have nothing to show for it in terms of quality of work. People who choose to do the things they love put every bit of what they learn to action. Well, maybe not every bit but I'm sure you know what I mean.