Career Advancement and You

I would absolutely be lying if I said I knew anything about career advancement. In fact, I’m way more worried about how I’m going to support myself at all once I’m out of school. Hell it seems like YouTube is just really harassing me about this. The amount of adds that say my degree is worthless and how many beer ads I’ve seen seem to say “give up”. Well I wont stand for it! I’m going to take a look at this vague, broad topic and see if I can’t find some easy ways to manage myself in my future career! Oh boy.

From what I found in a random article, apparently most people don’t exactly know what career advancement is. Which is not surprising given first article I read. I found about four articles all with the same title and they all refer to the first article in the google search. Amazing. The article I linked isn’t really helpful at all and is full of corporate lingo and it absolutely reeks of office stock photo jpeg boloney. This next article however, is much more clear about what career advancement really is. The basics to career advancement are essentially just doing extra work. As Deloy said on the first day of class, “be billable”. The article lists helping out internally as a good way to advance one’s career as well. something else the article states is that there is not a single thing wrong with being happy where you are at. I’ve never actually heard any one say that before. Everyone is all about “getting this bread” and climbing the corporate ladder. However, what if you are good at whatever it is that you do and already make decent money? Is it worth the extra stress? I think it would be worth it to do the extra work just to have the ability to move along or make extra money. Nobody ever said no to a well deserved raise. That’s absolutely not true but whatever. 

Something that I feel that relates to this topic is being bored both with and at work. The main driving force behind advancing in the office environment is ultimately being bored or dissatisfied with where you currently are. So in addition to doing extra work for the company, there is some extra work that you can do for you that will help out in the long run which this “bored at work” article talks about. The whole premise of the article is that there are things you can do that are productive when you are bored at work. Back when I did content migration for MSF&W on the ISBE project I was constantly moving data from one website to another. It took forever and there was no end in sight. I probably churned out about 50 web pages a day over the course of two months. The things on this list would’ve been great to know back then. A few things I saw on the list were, digitizing business cards, checking on the benefits offered by your company, reviewing your salary, cleaning your desk, and other such things. The reason I focused on these out of the fifty or so is that they all involve making yourself more presentable and knowing more about what your current position provides. All great things to know if you about to make some serious plays.