Blog — Clear Career

Many people have a story that follows this pattern. Start small, work hard, wait a longtime, and then finally, make it. But, this post isn't about those stories. This post is about how to take action and effectively land your dream job. So, here are 7 strategies that you can use right now to advance your career: 1) Read the room

One of the best ways to advance your career is understanding how to read a room. It’s having the social and emotional intelligence to accurately identify the landscape and respond with a fitting emotional response. Another way to look at this is, know your audience.

Using charisma, attention to detail, and effective communication skills, you can read rooms effectively. However, it’s not really about how you act or what you do, it’s about how you listen and respond to the wants, desires, and passions of your employer and/or team. This ultimately will bring value to you, your community, and your career.

2) Know what the problems are

Misunderstanding, miscommunication, and lack of expectations are a few of the things that derail careers and relationships. That’s why it’s important to know what the problems are, understand your audience, and deliver on your promises.

When you look at the highest performing professionals in the workplace, you’ll see knowledge and understanding; in many ways it’ll seem like these individuals are able to read the minds of their audiences. When you’re able - and willing - to understand the problems, you’ll be more prepared to provide appropriate solutions. This can relate to your working relationships as well as the advancement of organizations as a whole.

3) Be memorable

When you are memorable, you’re more than just you. Think about it this way: what do you remember about your grandparents? I’m guessing, it’s more than just their names. Likely, you remember their home, smell, sayings, and passions. This is because humans remember memorable things, not just people. So, think about how you can be memorable in a positive light.

Here are a few examples of how you can be memorable in your career:

You use a specific saying all the time
You treat people well consistently
You make jokes or you don’t make jokes
You understand yourself well – your strengths and weaknesses

4) Make your message about them, not simply you.

Everyone likes it when you make a message about them, and not simply about yourself. When you’re able to make your message about those around you and not just yourself, you create trust, and even more importantly, interest.

In a professional setting (i.e. an interview, training, or a review), it’s important to remember that you can actually get your agenda across by speaking directly about - and directly to – the challenges of those around you and how you can help them hurdle those obstacles.

5) Surround yourself with even better people

Create a tribe of contacts who are your biggest believers, who will advocate for you and rally around your messages, beliefs, and goals. But, more importantly, surround yourself with people who will make you look better, and ultimately, be better. When you do this, you create clout as a leader, and will be better prepared to actually be one.

6) Engage the outside regularly and thoughtfully

When it comes to advancing your career, it’s important to be consistent, keep people “in the know,” and to be thoughtful and strategic in your approach. When you’re able to do these things, you will actually begin to develop a trusted brand outside of your personal network or in the case of your job, outside of your professional role.

7) Be yourself

Building a personal brand creates a unified experience of you that those outside of your circle can relate to, and it also helps you understand more about yourself. Remember, we’re all different and unique. When you’re true to yourself, you’ll begin to land the jobs you want, in the cultures you’re looking for much more easily.

The above strategies are simple areas that you can control, and use, to advance your career. To learn more about how to take control of your career, click here.

Whether you’re looking for work, want to network like a pro, or hope companies will hire you to do contract work, you’ll want to have a LinkedIn profile that boosts your credibility and creates interest. Here are 5 things you can do to improve your LinkedIn profile:

1. GET A PROFESSIONAL HEADSHOT

While selfies, family photos, or those pictures you took with your friends at the bar, work on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, remember, LinkedIn is a professional network. Make your first investment in your career and put your money where your mouth is. Hire a professional headshot photographer to take a picture of your “money maker.”

A skilled headshot photographer will run you around $200. Once you’ve got several headshots in hand, run a few of your favorites past your friends, family, and colleagues to help you choose which one to use on your profile. Ultimately, it’s your decision of course, but the insight you get from people you trust is invaluable.

One final note, your LinkedIn profile picture is a marketing tool – you want this picture to look like your best self while still being recognizably you! No over-the-top glamour shots please – you’ll ultimately disappoint others when they meet you face to face.

Unsure how to find a photographer?

Use Thumbtack to locate headshot photographers near you
Please, please, please ask to see some of their other headshots your photographer has taken already

2. CREATE YOUR OWN LINKEDIN HEADLINE

Most professionals on LinkedIn leave their professional headline the same as their current work role – how completely boring and uninspiring is that? Remember, your LinkedIn profile is one of your most important marketing tools to launch your career into hyper-drive.

Instead, what you can do is craft a customized professional headline that fits your career objectives. For example, if you’re an independent contractor looking for work, you want to identify what your bottom-line value is to potential clients along with some of your personal brand – or how you prefer to do your work.

Some of my favorite LinkedIn headlines are from these folks:

3. WRITE A KILLER SUMMARY

Now that your headshot looks like something off of GQ or Vogue [okay – if you read that line without questioning it – you’d better re-read the first point] and your headline is intriguing, it’s time to right your killer summary.

Think about it. Most hiring managers and executives are looking at your profile on their mobile device – so you need to get to the point quickly and each line of your summary needs to be more compelling than the last. You want to keep these folks’ attention!

And while your personal interests may intrigue friends and family, remember that hiring managers and executives are looking for how you can help them or their company:

Make money
Save money
Save time

For more helpful tips on how to write a killer summary, check out this fantastic article by personal branding guru William Arruda

4. ENDORSE & RECOMMEND OTHERS

LinkedIn ranks your profile based on many variables, one of them is the endorsements and recommendations that other professionals give to you. Okay, so you’ve decided that you want to get other people to give you endorsement and recommendations, how do you go about doing this?

The bottom-line here is that you get what you give. One strategy that you can take to increase the number of recommendations, endorsements and also improve your profile views and rank is to give endorsements and recommendations to others.

Login to LinkedIn and find those professionals who really enjoy working with and who provided a lot of value to you or your company. Take the time to not only click on the endorsements on their LinkedIn profile, but write a few sentences of a recommendation for their profile. Once you do this, send it to them and ask if they’d reciprocate – likely they will and both of your LinkedIn profiles will be better off!

If the colleague you want an endorsement from is an extremely successful or busy professional you can make their life easier by writing up a LinkedIn profile recommendation for them about you and send it to them to copy, edit, and paste on your LinkedIn profile as them. They’ll love you for doing this and you’ll win extra “easy-to-work-with” brownie points.

5. KEEP YOUR PROFILE UPDATED

Finally, remember that your LinkedIn profile is not a one-and-done. You wouldn’t dream of wearing clothes that are out of style or worn out to work, so treat your LinkedIn profile the same way. Regularly make updates to it. If you’re extremely busy and want to leverage your time, schedule a time on your calendar once a quarter where you re-read your LinkedIn profile and make adjustments.

Also, make sure you’re updating your LinkedIn profile with recent courses that you completed, certifications you achieved, new associations you joined, or new positions you landed. And please update your status every so often so that we know you’re still alive – once a week is plenty. Other professionals want to see what you’re reading, what you’re doing to grow, or what advice you’d give them.

For more helpful strategies and tips to launch you into the career you always wanted, book a free consultation with me here.