Author: David Carpenter / Source: Lifehack
Are you looking to move up the career ladder? Or maybe you’re tired of having a “job” and want to start looking for a more permanent career?
Whatever your motivation, you are going to have to learn some new and different hard skills to broaden your opportunities.
After all, there’s a very famous quote that says:“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein
While the insanity part doesn’t really fit here, the overall message is a good one. If you are looking for a different result (career advancement, more money or even a career instead of a job), it’s up to you to make it happen. This is both the good news and bad news!
The good news is that because it’s up to you, you have complete control over it happening. The bad news is that change is hard. Humans are creatures of habit, that’s why we develop routines, and anything that disrupts that routine causes us anxiety. And we will do almost anything to get rid of that anxiety. The overweight person will calm their anxiety by eating that doughnut, the smoker will light up a cigarette to avoid anxiety.
What we want to do with this article is to give you the hard skills you’ll need to reduce that anxiety so you can move up that corporate ladder, make more money or have career instead of just a “job”.
So let’s just get this one out of the way first. Embrace the anxiety that comes with change. You know it’s going to be there, you know that you’ll want to give up but you’ll also know that the end result is worth the journey.
Here’s a little trick when you’re feeling overwhelmed:
Have you ever met an ex-smoker who was sorry they quit? An ex-drinker or drug user that said life was much better before they quit? These people have gone through some of the most difficult challenges humans can go through including weeks if not months of intense physical withdrawal symptoms. They did it because they knew that the pain and anxiety they would experience would ultimately get them to a much better life.
Now what was that complaint you had about attending night-school?
1. Develop New Skills for the Position You Want
This is the part everyone hates, everyone thinks night-school, adult education and just generally giving up family and or spare time. While those are certainly possible ways to develop the necessary skills, they aren’t the only way.
You’ll want to check with your human resources department because depending on the company, a certain degree maybe required in order to even be considered for a position. In those cases, night-school, on-line or some other form of adult education maybe your best route.
But as long as a degree isn’t required, then your options are wide open.
Let’s just say that you’re a sales person interested in becoming the sales manager but the territory you’ve been given will never produce the sales figures that would make you stand out as a good candidate for sales manager. So how about you start your own side business (don’t compete with your company), but let’s say you enjoy golf.
In this day and age, there are plenty of places that will teach you how to sell products on-line and even set you up with your own website. So you start a site selling golf equipment and accessories (don’t worry, you won’t even have to carry inventory or worry about shipping).
Now, when that sales manager spot opens up, you can explain that even though other salespeople had better numbers than you, it had nothing to do with your sales ability, it was more of a consequence of the territory your were given.
And to prove it, you brought in some information about a side business you started showing that you’re on target for a sales growth rate of 30% this year. And because you had to do all of the marketing for the business, you came up with some marketing strategies that you can bring to the new job (built-in experience).
2. Cloud Computing
“Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence and more—over the Internet “the cloud” to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.” Microsoft[1]
There are many different jobs available in the cloud computing world today. They range from architects and developers to data scientists, security pros. Each job is its own specialty and requires a high level of specification for advancement.
This is definitely a hard skill that requires education. But if the tech world and computers are your thing you can make cloud computing a lucrative career.
3. Data Mining and Statistical Analysis
Again, these are highly specialized fields. Data mining is…
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