Making The Most Of Your Career Opportunity
When opportunities to start or advance your career arise, it’s tempting to jump in with both feet and snatch it up. That’s not the best way to go about it. Instead, you need to plan, to prepare, and to know what you’re going to do in your career before the opportunity presents itself to you. There’s nothing worse than getting a great career opportunity and squandering it through lack of preparation; I know, I’ve done it at least twice. Before you grab that opportunity, before you even see the opportunity, there are several things you can do. First, repeat to yourself this mantra: Opportunity does knock more than once. Rather than being like a boat on a river, opportunity is more like the brass ring on a carousel; it’ll come around to you a second time, and your real job is to position yourself to grab it. A lot of people divide the world into the lucky ones and the unlucky ones. This, for the most part, is a bad way of looking at things. You make your own luck. By educating yourself on what career opportunities you want to take advantage of, you can identify what you need to do to prepare yourself. By preparing yourself, opportunities will come to you. A story: Joe decides he wants to be a computer engineer. While still in high school, Joe looks at all the education that’s out there, and figures out that he’d have an edge if he found a part-time job fixing computers. So he takes a two-week course over the summer to get his A+ certification, and in his last year of high school creates his own business repairing and maintaining computers. But, though that pays well, though he had opportunity there, it wasn’t what Joe wanted to do. So he goes to college, starting his business over again there, posting fliers, advertising, and picking up computer repair jobs where he could, ultimately working for the university computer lab. When he graduates, he finds a job as IT manager right away with a computer business in his hometown who remembered how professional he was with his childhood computer business. Joe made an opportunity. Mack, on the other hand, drifted in high school, learning a lot but not really planning for his future. He drifts into college after going into the Navy for a couple of years, and in his junior year decides he wants to be a computer engineer. He makes great grades, graduates, and finds an entry level job with a large computer firm where he’s mostly lost in the crowd. Since he never learned to plan ahead, he gets cut when the first round of downsizing firings comes along after the dot-com bust. Mack winds up in a different career, jealous of Joe because he had all the luck. See the distinction? By preparing yourself for what you want to do, you really make your own career opportunities. After planning, you should prepare. Get your education. Don’t stop there; join professional organizations and network with people who already are in the career you want. Between learning all about your chosen field and learning who the people are in it, you’re putting yourself several steps ahead of everyone