Best skills to learn to earn more money

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Earn more money|Best skills to learn to earn more moneyHow much money are you making now? Do you think it’s enough to live comfortably in your location? If not, then maybe it’s time to take a look at the skills that could help increase your income. There’re plenty of opportunities out there for people with certain skill sets to earn more money! Take a few moments and read through this post about some skills that will give you an edge over others when applying for jobs. You may be surprised by what you find out!

Construction

If you’re looking for a career that will always be in demand, then construction is a great option. There are always new buildings being constructed and older ones that need repairs! This is a great industry to get into if you’re willing to put in the hard work.

Computer Science

Computers play an enormous role in our lives these days, and that’s not going to change any time soon. If you’re good with computers, then consider taking your computer skills to the next level by learning coding or other things like hardware troubleshooting.

Data Entry

Copy and pasting info from one place to another is the definition of data entry! This is an easy skill to learn, so there’s really no reason not to add it to your resume. And if you learn another language, like Spanish or French, then even better!

Plumbing

At one point or another, everyone is going to need their sink fixed! If you’re not opposed to getting your hands dirty and learning how to fix things, then this could be a great option for you. The only downside is plumbing tends to pay lower than other careers with similar skill requirements. But if you don’t mind taking a pay cut, then this could be a great choice for you.

Real Estate and Investing in Property

The real estate industry is always growing, and there’s always a need for new agents. If you’re good with people and have a knack for sales, then this could be a great career choice for you! You’ll need training if you’re serious about getting into real estate. Try Asset Academy; they’ve got a fantastic four-step program focusing on all aspects of property investment. You’ll be ready to get going in no time!

Copywriting

Copywriting is the process of writing copy for advertisements, web pages, or other marketing materials. If you’re good at this, then you can easily make more money than the average person. Many companies are always looking for good copywriters!

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the process of promoting a brand or product using digital channels. This can include things like social media, email campaigns, and search engine optimization. If you’re good at this, then you could easily make a career out of it!

E-commerce

According to eMarketer, back in 2014, 63.3% of adults used the internet on a daily basis. That number is only going to rise as time progresses! This means there has never been a better time than now to start an e-commerce business. Just be warned: it’s not as easy as it looks. You’ll need to put in a lot of hard work if you want your business to be successful.

4 Signs It’s Time To Find A New Job

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Time to find a new job|4 Signs It's Time To Find A New JobSometimes, there comes a moment in your life where you realize that your current job isn’t right for you. Moreso than that, you realize your whole career just isn’t right for you at all. It’s time to make a big change and find a new job. The key is learning how to identify when this time is right. As a result, you’ll avoid wasting months of your life working a job that you will eventually leave. Instead, you can spot the warning signs early, leave as soon as possible, and use that extra time to train or find a new job right away.

With that in mind, what are the telltale signs it’s time to find a new job?

You’re not appreciated by your employer

Arguably the biggest sign it’s time to leave your job is if your employer pays you no attention. Ironically, so many people remain in jobs when they’re underappreciated. Why? Because you convince yourself that it’s greedy or selfish to want some attention from your boss. In reality, you deserve it! If you do a good job, you deserve to get a slap on the back and a well done now and then. More than that, you deserve a bonus, a raise, or a promotion. Have you ever got any of these or know anyone in your business that has? If not, the employer doesn’t value their employees, so why bother working for them? You can find the same job in a different company and enjoy much better benefits and appreciation, with room to grow and earn more money or gain promotions.

You’re on an awful benefits program

Benefits were mentioned in the previous sentence, and they play a big role in deciding if you should quit your job or not. As an employee, you deserve certain employee benefits. The very least of which should be a pension of sorts. Your employer should set up a fund for you and pay some of your wages into it every month. Alongside this, they should make a monthly contribution, helping you save for retirement. If you don’t have one of these at your job, it’s a big sign to find a new one that offers a good pension.

Furthermore, the more benefits a job can provide, the better. Some careers will have better benefits plans than others. For instance, a lot of healthcare jobs come with lots of good benefits that you wouldn’t find in an office job. Likewise, teaching jobs come with loads of days of holiday and great pensions. If you currently receive very little in terms of employment benefits, it could be time to look elsewhere.

Your job is too dangerous

Does every day present significant risks to your health & wellbeing? You’ll be amazed at how many jobs out there are just really dangerous. Even simple ones, like being a truck driver, can be bad for your health. You spend a lot of time driving a massive vehicle that can easily cause accidents on the roads. And good luck getting legal help when injured in a truck accident as the courts usually favor the drivers of smaller cars. Construction workers are another common example of people doing dangerous or high-risk jobs. There are so many ways to hurt yourself on a construction site; every day could be the day you end up in hospital.

Put it this way: you shouldn’t have to worry about your health when at work. If it’s got to a point where you’re tired and sore every day, you may consider leaving. Find a job that’s safer and less dangerous to your health for a better work/life balance.

You feel unfulfilled

Lastly, look at how you feel when you think about work every day. When you leave your job and go to sleep at night, do you feel fulfilled? Does your job excite you – do you enjoy it? If you hate your job and believe it brings you nothing but a paycheck, it could be time to look for something new.

This is something that indicates if you should change careers. A sense of unfulfillment can be down to the job you perform; it just might not be the right one for you. Instead, you can change careers and embark on a journey to find a job that leaves you fulfilled. Even if it pays a little less, you’ll feel so much happier doing something that brings you joy.

If you notice any of these signs, you should reassess whether or not this job is right for you. It might mean quitting and finding the same job at a different company. Or, it could mean you pack in this career and find a better and more rewarding one.

How to Take Control of Your Career

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Take control of your career|How to Take Control of Your CareerLife is busy, and the months and years can fly by in what seems like the blink of an eye. With time passing so quickly, many people find themselves stuck in the same job, following the same routine each day without even realizing it. So, when they suddenly notice they have been doing the same job for years and every day feels like groundhog day, it can be an essential wake-up call. If you feel like you have been drifting through life and your role is no longer fulfilling, you may be ready to make a change and to take back control.

Realizing your career is not progressing in the way you hoped can be frustrating. But recognizing that something needs to change is the best way to get your job back on track. Putting yourself back in the driving seat and regaining control of your career can benefit every part of your life. Once you get started and begin taking control of your job, you will soon regain your enthusiasm.

Time to Change?

If you have been unhappy with your job for a while, you will need to decide whether it is worth persevering and sticking with it for the long term or whether you need to try something new. Making the break and moving on to a new role can be scary and unsettling, but doing so can bring a renewed sense of purpose into your life.

If you decide to stay with your current employer, you may want to explore the different career options available in the company. Taking on a new role in the same organization is an excellent way to revive your interest in your career and do a job you love. Alternatively, you may decide that you have been following a career path that is not right for you. If this is the case, you may want to focus your attention on thinking about the type of job you would like and how you will make that happen. It is never too late to change your career, so if there is a job you would rather do, why not find out more about it and make it happen?

Reach Out For Guidance

Whether you are just starting your career or you are a seasoned employee, seeking guidance from others is always helpful. Discussing your options with other people can be a valuable way to gain a fresh perspective on your career and will help you make an informed decision on your plans for the future. Talking through your options with your boss is helpful, but seeking a mentor to guide you is likely to be even more useful.

Having a mentor is an excellent way to get your career moving in the right direction. A mentor will help you map out your plans and be by your side to support you while you put them into action. When you choose to work with a mentor, you can benefit from someone else’s experience and skills, which can be helpful when you are trying to enhance your career. Your mentor will also assist you in developing your interview skills to help you secure a new position. While having a mentor can provide many benefits, you will only enjoy these benefits if you find the right mentor.

Selecting a mentor that is not right for you can be a negative experience. So, choosing your mentor carefully is essential. It is helpful to use a Mentoring Platform to help you connect with a wide choice of mentors so you can select someone that best matches your needs.

Make a Plan for Success

Achieving career success means different things to different people. For some, career success means reaching a high-ranking position in their organization, and for others achieving success means securing a six-figure salary. Deciding what your idea of career success looks like is the first step toward making it happen.

Understanding what you want to achieve from your career is an excellent starting point, but knowing how you will make it a reality requires further thought. One way to take ownership of your career plan is to set yourself goals. Setting yourself SMART goals is an excellent way to propel your career forwards. Making a plan for success and then breaking it down into smaller goals will make your career progression so much more manageable. Mapping out a route towards success in this way will help prevent you from becoming overwhelmed and make it easier to achieve the successful outcome you are aiming towards.

Forge Connections

Making connections and getting yourself noticed is a great way to open yourself up to a whole range of new opportunities. Through networking, you may discover an entire range of career options you have not previously considered, and you may even find yourself offered a new role. There are several ways that you can forge connections to benefit your career. Networking is one of the most popular methods of meeting like-minded people and building up your contacts. Looking out for networking groups in your area and joining them will put you in touch with a wide range of connections that you would not have met otherwise.

Keep Monitoring Your Progress

Taking control of your career and achieving your full potential at work is not easy. Maintaining constant progress and pushing yourself forward is challenging, and at times, you may feel your motivation is slipping. To keep your motivation levels high and to sustain your focus, you need to monitor your progress along the way. Celebrating every small success and acknowledging how far you have come on your journey is an excellent way to keep yourself moving in the right direction.

Checking back in with your goals regularly to ensure you are not venturing off track will help you stay in control of your career. With plenty of focused effort and lots of tenacity, you will not only be able to take control of your career but develop it way beyond your expectations.

5 Project Management Skills You Need To Have

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The Proof Of Fire

StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Project Management Skills|5 Project Management Skills You Need To HaveSometimes the only way to test something is through what’s known as a “trial by fire”. Now, that may not mean there’s actually a fire; it’s a turn of phrase that indicates extreme testing. A car designed to be safe if an accident causes a roll needs to be rolled. Crash test dummies exist owing to the need for a “trial by fire”, as it were, pertaining to associated safety features.

As a Project Manager or PM, your trial by fire is probably going to be whatever projects you’re working to complete. Each new project will be its own trial by fire, and that which is being put on metaphorical trial are your skills as a PM. Some projects are essentially impossible, while some PMs can’t even handle “softball” assignments.

Regardless of inherent management acumen, like exercise, PM skills can be improved. Part of that improvement involves following known best practices. Here are five skills that any PM should already be proficient in; and if you’re not, at minimum find ways of enhancing your abilities as regards the following.

1. Prioritization

Task priority is quite important. Product testing isn’t as high a priority as prototype development. If you don’t have something to test, how can you test it? So you need to know which steps are most important for which situation.
Determining such steps may well involve specifying a general outline for your project from beginning to end, and organizing efforts based on associated priority.

2. Effective Delegation Of Tasks

Tasks need to be delegated based not only on priority but based on the skill of employees to whom tasks are delegated. That means you need to know your team intimately enough to determine who will do a good job, and who can’t be trusted with certain responsibilities. Everyone has skills, and you want to delegate accordingly.

3. Self-Examination: External Testing Options Help

One of the most important things is to know your own efficacy as a PM. Some of your tasks will involve hands-on participation in a given project, while others will require you to be a more remote player in the production overall. Especially if you’re in a more remote role, a PMP practice exam can be very helpful in advance, as well as between varying projects.

4. Flexibility: Unexpected Circumstances Develop Regularly

You’ve got to be willing to “roll with the changes”, as that old REO Speedwagon song goes. Sometimes someone quits mid-project, sometimes management changes operational focus throughout a given company, sometimes budgets dry up, sometimes bad PR impacts project viability. Flexibility is absolutely paramount to managing such uncontrollable variables.

5. Perseverance: Some Projects Are Much Harder Than Others

You’ve got to be able to see things through. Your first project, if you’ve got a managerial staff of any quality, is going to be something you can handle. As you successfully handle varying products, you’ll be trusted with more complex work.

Certain projects may take years to complete, and that requires perseverance. A “bigger picture” perspective helps both initiate and foster necessary perseverance.

Optimizing Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager

Perseverance, flexibility, honest self-examination that incorporates external means of determination, task delegation, and prioritization all represent fundamental aspects of project management. If you’re in the position of PM for your company, you need to be sure your abilities incorporate such skills.

Certainly, these aspects of effective project management are stated in broad terms. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not fundamentally essential. Whatever your project is, as a manager you’re operating as a leader of sorts, and that means being able to juggle complex projects with skill over the long run.

3 Reasons to Not Let Your Doubts Keep You from Pursuing Your Dream Career

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Pursue your Dream Career|3 Reasons to Not Let Your Doubts Keep You from Pursuing Your Dream CareerMany people out there have a “dream career” in mind. Something that they would really love to do, and would find deeply meaningful.

Far too often, though, doubt ends up getting in the way and we end up settling for “safer” options, instead of putting ourselves out there and earnestly pursuing our dream careers. This is in spite of the fact that there are now many platforms and services out there which can streamline the process of getting started in your dream career, such as Preceptor Tree.

Here are just a few reasons not to let your doubts keep you from pursuing your dream career.

Because your thoughts about things may be deeply mistaken, and direct experience gives real perspective

Although you may feel as though you have a pretty clear insight into the potential obstacles that stand in the way of you achieving your dream career, the fact of the matter is that your thoughts may be a lot less accurate than you may think – even when you feel as though you’re being very logical.

In order to make predictions about how things are going to turn out, and in order to create “logical projections” as well, we all need to make certain assumptions on the basis of our past experiences and biases, and on the basis of the mental maps that we have constructed.

In many cases, though, direct experience ends up proving to be very different than what we had thought about a given situation.

This is a pretty clear reason why it’s important not to let your own self-defeating thoughts prevent you from taking steps to pursue your dream career. There’s a good chance that those self-defeating thoughts are mistaken, or are in any case not providing the full picture.

Because striving to achieve something that you find meaningful can enrich your life in all sorts of other ways.

Even if you don’t necessarily succeed in achieving your dream career, simply striving to achieve something that you find genuinely meaningful can enrich your life in all sorts of other ways, ranging from granting you a great deal more motivation and enthusiasm each day, to showing you all sorts of options that you had never considered.

The momentum that pursuing your dream career can give you, and the process of discovery that comes from working honestly towards a dream in this way, can be fundamentally rewarding, and can be game changers in and of themselves.

And, at the end of the day, you won’t have to sit around thinking “what would’ve happened if I had just tried?”

Because the more proactive and engaged you are, the more opportunities will arise.

Being proactive and engaged, in general, tends to generate a lot of opportunities along the way – whereas simply going through the motions and remaining in your comfort zone, at a day job that you don’t much enjoy, doesn’t tend to generate many opportunities at all.

Pursuing your dream career– like all other proactive endeavours – has the potential to open many doors.