How Your Career Can Help You to Help Others

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article | How Your Career Can Help You to Help OthersMany people volunteer in their free time to support the causes that they value. However, others feel that volunteering is not enough, so they begin careers that allow them to help other people. If you want to do more to improve your community, consider starting a new career in one of these areas.

Law

One stereotype about lawyers is that they are all corrupt and just work for the money. However, most lawyers genuinely care about the people they represent and want to make their lives better. If you look at your credentials and think, “What legal firm would hire me?”, other options are available. You could help expert witnesses to prepare their testimonies, or you could serve as the court reporter for your county’s courthouse. If the courtroom scene does not appeal to you, get involved with local politics by running for an elected office at the county or state level. This path allows you to create legislation that helps at-risk groups and addresses issues you’ve witnessed in your community.

Medicine

One of the most tangible ways to help other people is to begin a career in medicine. Becoming a doctor is a famously difficult career path, and if you have already worked for several years, you may not want to spend so much time in school again. However, if you begin a career as a nurse, technician or even receptionist, you will still help people to recover from their illnesses and feel more comfortable.

While physical health is important, so is mental health. However, many people forget that mental health is also a part of medicine. To become a certified psychiatrist, you need to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but some of your earlier education may transfer. If counseling does not appeal to you, consider working for nonprofits that promote mental health awareness and suicide prevention programs.

Education

In the United States, each state stipulates how long children must attend school. These numbers vary, but all states require education until well into the teenage years. Becoming involved in education is a great way to have a positive impact on these children’s lives. If you already have a bachelor’s degree, return to school to become certified to teach at the level you are most comfortable with. If teaching does not appeal to you, find out how you can work as a receptionist, guidance counselor, coach or nurse at your local high school. Some people love to teach but do not want to have a full classroom of students. You can tutor individual students in a variety of subjects, including music and foreign languages. Finally, if you have extensive experience in an area such as science or politics, consider completing advanced degrees and teaching college.

Volunteering is an excellent way to spend your free time. However, if you want to take your community involvement to the next level, consider switching your career to one in law, medicine or education. By taking your job seriously and working to help the people you encounter, you can make a substantial difference in their lives and your community’s culture.

How To Improve Your Professional Development

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article | How To Improve Your Professional DevelopmentWhatever your role – business owner, team leader, staff member – it is human nature to want to learn new skills and grow as a person. Personal and professional development are both key to this, but it is the latter – development in the context of the workplace, such as skills that can be used in your career – that can occasionally be difficult to know where to start with.

Primarily, there are a few key principles to remember:

  1. Stay motivated
  2. Increase how much you read
  3. Learn from different industries
  4. Get feedback on what you’re learning
  5. Attend a training program
  6. Assess your progress

The Basics of Professional Development

If you’re not motivated, you’re unlikely to learn anything new, or at least anything new quickly. If you struggle with self-motivation, perhaps you could team up with a partner and set each other targets to push each other. This will also help vary the way in which you learn, as you can share hints and tips for what methods are working. The most obvious method for widening your professional horizons is to read more. Reading books not only based in your field of work but other ones as well will give you a wider, more rounded outlook on your job.

Getting in touch with people in other businesses and industries and asking what sort of professional development they have done – or what skills they need for their job – is also a good idea. Developing yourself in the context of your own position is obviously useful for the present but equipping yourself with knowledge and skills of other positions will make you a more attractive worker or business partner in the future.

Once you have started learning a new skill or studying a new business practice, it’s never a bad idea to ensure you’re working along the right lines by either getting feedback or checking your progress against examples. For instance, if you’re learning more about search engine optimization, looking into case studies for SEO is a good way of gauging your understanding against real-life examples.

Working with experts in the field you are studying and trying to grow your understanding will also improve your rate of development. If it’s a skill that you can enroll in a training course for, consider doing so. If you can, contact somebody who has already completed the course to ensure it’s worth the investment. Always find professionals with a lot of experience and with proven examples of their training improving a business.

Embarking on learning a new skill, developing your existing ones, or any other form of furthering your professional improvement can seem like a daunting task. It is never easy to remove yourself from your comfort zone, but pushing yourself and surrounding yourself with knowledge will help you do your job better and encourage those around you to do the same. Assessing your progress as you go along – looking back and seeing where you were at a week, month or year ago – will demonstrate how far you have come and motivate you to go further.

Who Knew There Were So Many Financially-Rewarding Nursing Careers?

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Nursing Career|Who Knew There Were So Many Financially-Rewarding Nursing Careers?Becoming a fully-trained doctor is a massive undertaking and something that can take many years. A medical student can start college at the age of eighteen and still be doing exams as they approach their thirtieth birthday.

Sure – they ultimately wind up making a lot of money. But getting to that point is by no means easy. There are all kinds of pitfalls and struggles along the way.

However, taking one of the top online LPN programs provides an alternative route into the medical profession. And it is no less rewarding. Many senior nurses get paid over the odds for the work that they do. And they develop specialisms to rival those of any fully-trained physician.

Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner

The opportunities to help people who have psychiatric disorders, for instance, are considerable. Psychiatric nurse practitioners work alongside physicians and provide mental health support for patients with identifiable disorders in the DSM-5.

While these nurses work alongside psychiatrist physicians, they are almost always specialists in their own right, providing front-line care to those who need it most.

Nurses who want to go into this field require a Master of Science In Nursing – the lowest degree requirement for becoming a nurse practitioner. Getting an MBA, however, is usually pretty straightforward. You just put in a couple of years of your time and get a significant pay-off when you come out on the other side. Psychiatric nurse practitioners typically earn around $105,000 per year, translating to around $51 per hour worked.

Neonatal Intensive Care Nurse

Nurses who can work in neonatal intensive care are in high demand right now. Hospitals need professionals who can work alongside doctors and provide the correct level of attention to premature babies.

Currently, this area of medicine is experiencing rapid growth. New technologies are coming online that are allowing premature babies to make it to maturity when they simply wouldn’t in the past.

The work, however, is also becoming more labor-intensive. More babies are viable, so hospitals need more staff to look after them all. And that’s pushing up demand for certain types of nurses – particularly those able to work in the neonatal unit.

Salaries for neonatal nurses, therefore, are going up quickly. The latest figures suggest the average nurse in this professional earns $102,000 per year, translating to roughly $54 per hour.

There are employment opportunities in various settings, including birth centers, intensive care units, and well-baby units.

Registered Nurse Anesthetists

Administering anesthetics is a highly specialist job, requiring an immense level of skill and training. Anesthetists must understand how to prepare and administer sedatives in a variety of settings, including operating theatres. It is essential to get it right to protect the patient and ensure the operation is a success.

Pay in the sector, therefore, is tremendous. A qualified nurse anesthetist can earn upwards of $167,000 per year, translating to around $80 per hour.

The growth outlook for the sector is also quite considerable. For instance, the BLS expects demand for anesthetist services to grow a whopping 17 percent annually, with only a moderate slow down as we go into the mid-2020s.

The requirements for the role are also relatively mild. As a minimum, you need to have completed a master’s degree from an accredited institution and completed an anesthesia educational program. You also need to complete the National Certification Examination – as all nurses must.

These nurses find employment in a variety of settings, including surgical and pain-management centers.

StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Nursing Career|Who Knew There Were So Many Financially-Rewarding Nursing Careers?General Nurse Practitioner

What if you don’t want to specialize in any particular area? Do you still have options?

It turns out that you do. Currently, there’s significant demand for general nurse practitioners – people who can slot into practically any medical setting.

General nurse practitioners can offer their services in hospitals and specialize in particular fields if they want to progress their careers.

General nurse practitioners earn an average of $107,000 per year. If they work forty hours per week, that translates to $51.45 per hour – which is a very competitive rate of pay, compared to most other sectors.

The requirements are a Master of Science in Nursing and a Nurse Practitioner License for the relevant state. Nurses can change from one state to another, but there are rules governing this that they must observe. These nurses tend to have the most options when it comes to choosing where to work. They can offer their skills in practically every setting.

So, are you considering pursuing a career in nursing that rewards you financially? You probably should!

Staying Motivated In Your Career : 3 Stellar Strategies to Try

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Staying Motivated|Staying Motivated In Your Career : 3 Stellar Strategies to TryIt is not always easy to stay motivated at work. In fact, long hours, plus stress can drain all of the dedication and focus out of you. However, even if you are feeling the pull of inertia, there are some tactics you can use to stay consistently motivated. Read on to discover what they are.

Get your goal setting right.

The first way to maintain your motivation at work is to understand effective goal setting. This is because if you are always aiming for things in the distant future, it can be straightforward to lose the motivation to continue.

Instead, you must make sure that you have a mix of immediate, short, medium, and long term goals. For example, your long term goal may be to start up your own business. However, you may wish to set becoming a manager in the company in which you already word as a medium-term goal. Additionally, a short term goal would be to secure a raise and more responsibility in your current role. While an immediate goal could be to go and ask you superior to evaluate your progress so far.

In fact, in this way you can achieve something this week, and at various stages towards your end goal. All of which will help you achieve your end goal, but will also ensure that you stay motivated along the journey.

Understanding your motivation.

Another critical aspect of staying motivated in your career is getting to grips with what motivates you as a person. In fact, there are various ways of doing this, such as defining your values or goals in life.

However, one of the most effective ways to uncover the thing that drives you is to use tools like the Enneagram. The Enneagram test can be useful for personal development because it highlights both an individual’s most fundamental fear and their most basic desire. That is what they are moving towards and away from in all areas of their lives. Of course, both of these are essential areas of motivation for any type of action, including the ones we take concerning our career.

Meaningful work.

Finally, when it comes to motivation in your career, a touch of realism is vital. That is that in every single job there is, there are bad days. Days when you are fed up, drained and want to throw in the towel.

However, when you have a meaningful career, it is a lot easier to get through the more negative experiences. This is because then you will have an underlying motivation that trumps any issues you may face.

To that end, when selecting or changing a career, consider more than just the pay grade.

Instead, you also must consider factors like the ones below as well:

  • What you love to do.
  • How what you do can make a positive difference in the world.
  • What you are good at

In fact, this sweet spot between all of these factors is something the Japanese refer to as Ikigai. This is a state that will help you stay motivated at work even on the most challenging of days.

How to Grow Your Leadership Skills Effortlessly

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Leadership Skills|HOW TO GROW YOUR LEADERSHIP SKILLS EFFORTLESSLYWe step into this life without any aims, just tears in our eyes. As time passes by, along with our body, our urges elongate as well. From childhood, we want our desires to get fulfilled at first. We want to be the first one in every aspect of life. It’s like a natural entity that follows us everywhere. As we move ahead in our lives, we want to gain a quality education or some exciting multimillion business ideas. We want a secure future with warm pockets and hefty bank accounts. Our desires get all over our minds that may become a seed that blossoms into selfishness. It’s not sure because we are unpleasant beings; the challenging traits of this world have forced us to move on such a sinister path. Not everyone is lucky enough to afford the realms of desires that never diminish.

Leaders are born in the same world, among the same people. The only quality that differs from others is that they don’t differentiate themselves from others. Everyone aspires to become a leader, a leader who is followed and loved unanimously by others.

The fundamental thing you need to become a leader is the desire to lead from the front. The audacity to face any challenge striking like a lethal sword must be dwelling within your bloodstream. Some are born leaders; others sweat a lot to become one. The heights of the word leadership are limitless. You can grow your skills to become the best. All it needs is the courage to become one. Here, go through prime points on how to improve your leadership skills without any extra efforts.

Get Top-Notch Knowledge:

The main difference between an animal and a human is knowledge and education. Proper education plays a vital role in sprouting out the elements of surprises in men. With adequate knowledge and perfect skills, he can turn out to be a great leader. A Masters in Education Policy thrives the factors related to leadership and provides complete bundles of greatness. If you have exact knowledge of what you’re dealing with, you can excel at any task.

Be Valorous and Courageous:

Have you ever seen a coward leading from the front? Well, the answer is no. To enhance your leadership skills, you have to become more audacious. It has a positive impact on your team. Their productivity and functionality will automatically upgrade under the courageous person.

Display Discipline:

A disciplined life, either professional or personal, always gives positive results. The more you get disciplined, the more chances are off to become a great leader and an increase in your capabilities. Not only should you be taught, but make your work environment such that people idolize and follow you. Be punctual, always settle things before time, and keep an eye on your team’s activities. If you show a deficiency in discipline, people wouldn’t consider you eligible for being a good leader.

Stay Alert:

A good leader knows what’s happening around him, but a better leader can predict what’s going to happen as well. His mind stays alert and always has a more exceptional picture of the scenarios and problems he can incur. The precautions he takes to avoid any mishaps put the spotlight on him. So, staying alert and aware can increase your levels of leadership significantly without any tiresome efforts.

Discover Your Capabilities:

We are human beings. There is a world inside us, waiting to discover. Great people are those who go deep in their abyss of capabilities and extract them out. A little polishing on the skills can take you to the extremities of supremacy. Take some time out for you and look for the natural gifts you’re born. There are things you learn in your life, as well. Combine this deadly duo and wait for the magic you will have at your fingertips to rule. These qualities will surely do wonders for you.

Be Passionate and Visionary:

Having a vision in mind and passion in the blood to achieve it makes you a leader people long to see. Do you want to spark the enthusiasm in your team to work for your vision? Show them the passion you possess. Biologically, it just takes some hormones to ignite the fire in you. Be the wildfire, burn away all the hindrances, and attain your destiny with your team. Never forget to help your team and appreciate their efforts. It aligns them with your vision.

Be Bold Enough to Decide:

One of the best qualities of great leaders is taking a decision and making it right for their purpose; that’s what leaders are for anyway. Sometimes the choice can turn all the faces of guns towards you. It depends on how you tackle it and turn the tables. Learn from your mistakes, and never hesitate to decide. Analyze all the possible scenarios first and then select. If you keep on working on your decision-making skills, the day will come; you wouldn’t miss the bullseye.

Communicate Effectively:

The leader’s job is to work along with his team and touch the stars of success. Dealing with people of different backgrounds can be a hectic task. For this, amazing leaders communicate efficiently. They make sure everyone understands the goals and visions. Listening patiently to what others have to say pave the way for leaders to decide better. Your body language should be firm, along with all the verbal.

Be Innovative:

The trends of the world have been changing with time drastically. Those who lack the pace to adapt are left behind. A good leader’s brain should be active and smart. He should make strategies to stand out from others. He should motivate his team to cultivate new ideas to thrive. Always try to improvise the working methods and way of thinking. That is how change comes, and you can become one of the most exceptional leaders.

Create Flexibility:

Things don’t always go as planned. A good leader has the skills to deal effectively with the twists and turns. There might come a time when you have to bear something you don’t want to. But a good leader is always ready to accept. He is still concerned about the prime goal, not the path to that goal.

Show Transparency and Honestly:

Honesty is the best policy. A good leader is always transparent and honest in his work. He let his team know how things are going and keep them well updated. In this way, an environment of trust builds in a team that is quite essential to achieve goals.

Conclusion

Aspects mentioned above are the usual traits of human life. They are always present in the body. It just needs a spark to bloom. If you’re already a leader, you can amplify your skills without any efforts by following them. Start working on yourself today, and with the time, you will see how everything turns in to your favor. These are the best elements to make your name written in gold in the book of great leaders.