Career advancement is a process of gaining experience, enhancing your skills, and progressing toward your long-term professional goals. This extends beyond securing a bigger paycheck at the end of the month and encompasses a comprehensive journey toward a fulfilling life.
In this article, we’ll define career advancement to help you understand all of its aspects. Then, we’ll give you actionable steps and strategic advice that can help you set goals, create timelines, and grow in the direction that aligns with your needs and aspirations.
Key Takeaways
Career advancement is the process of progressing in your professional life and achieving your long-term goals.
The best way to advance your career is to have concrete goals and timelines, to track your progress, enhance your skills, and be your own advocate.
When progressing your career, pay close attention to the opportunities, consider the timing, and evaluate both internal and external moves.
If you’re transitioning to a new field as a part of your career advancement, perform self-assessment and industry research, bridge any skill gaps, tailor your resume when applying for a new role, and be patient and persistent.
What Is Career Advancement?
Career advancement is an ascending progression of your professional life. Some of the most common career advancement examples include a promotion at work, an increase in salary, and additional benefits. However, the concept is much broader than that and encompasses more than just a financial aspect.
For instance, advancing your career is typically closely related to upskilling or even reskilling. Improving your abilities and obtaining new ones increases the quality of your work and helps you be more productive. On the other hand, reskilling allows you to move laterally into a field that offers more potential for future growth.
That’s why it’s critical to understand that how you measure career advancement is an individual thing. It is closely related to your personal goals and aspirations, as well as your definition of success and advancement.
Where one person might work on their management skills, eager to advance to a supervisor role, the other can focus on improving their technical skills to become an expert in their field.
Regardless, as you’re becoming more proficient in your sphere, you’ll start growing your network and taking on additional responsibilities. This creates a positive feedback loop, where increased responsibility leads to additional expertise, thereby exponentially accelerating your progress.
Lastly, it’s important to make a career advancement vs. career development distinction.
While the two concepts share many similarities and are often used interchangeably, career development is a broader process that includes improving work-life balance. It involves a holistic approach to your career, taking into account how your learning and advancement might influence your personal life and leisure.
5 Essential Steps for Career Advancement.
Being deliberate about your career advancement will help you achieve your goals more quickly and efficiently. Here are the five essential steps to help guide you along the way:
#1. Define Your Goals
The first step in advancing your professional life should be to set clear and attainable career goals. Having an established objective in mind allows you to focus your efforts toward achieving it. You’ll know in which direction to move, and the purpose will keep you motivated.
When defining your goals, it’s recommended to use an established framework, like SMART goals. SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals help you avoid ambiguity, letting you create actionable steps that you can track to measure your progress.
In general, it’s best to have both short- and long-term goals. Short-term goals should be something that you can achieve within one or two years. These incremental improvements will accumulate in the long run and result in a significant advancement throughout your career.
Meanwhile, long-term goals should cover a period of five to ten years. They should be about greater transformations that encompass everything from financial and learning aspects to work-life balance.
#2. Create a Timeline to Achieve Your Goal
Once you have your goals set, you want to create a career advancement timeline to make sure that you’re progressing at a desired pace.
For starters, you should break down larger objectives into specific tasks with set deadlines. This allows you to create a precise roadmap that you can use to monitor your progress and stay motivated as you start hitting your targets.
Each long-term goal should consist of several short-term ones. As you complete them, you’ll know that you’re on track, and you’ll use the momentum to keep going.
For example, if your long-term goal is to get a senior management position, your short-term goals should be to complete leadership training, get a lower-level lead role to gain experience, and finally apply for a senior position. Each of those goals can be broken down further as you start working on them.
Finally, it’s important to regularly review your timeline and make adjustments if needed. As circumstances change and opportunities arise, you should adapt to maximize the return on your efforts.
#3. Treat Performance Reviews as Career Advancement Opportunities
Don’t look at performance reviews as just a formality; view them as valuable career advancement opportunities. Use them to receive constructive feedback from your supervisors and professionals with more experience than yourself.
More than that, you can directly seek guidance on how you can advance within the company, even when you aren’t due for an immediate promotion. That way, you’ll receive concrete and actionable steps that you can take to progress while demonstrating initiative and eagerness to the upper management.
To get the most out of your performance reviews, you should prepare for them by gathering relevant information. This includes your efforts, achievements, contributions, and skills improved or acquired. You can then use this data to ask specific questions on what you can do next and how you can progress within the company and as a professional.
#4. Be Your Own Career Advocate
While other people can help you, nobody will be as invested in your career advancement as you are. Being your own career advocate means actively seeking opportunities to improve yourself and progress. This includes not only enhancing your skill set and gaining the necessary experience, but also showcasing your work and talking about your goals.
Instead of waiting for opportunities to arise, you should be proactive and seek them on your own. You can ask to work on projects that align with your goals or apply for roles that lead to the one you’re aiming for. If you feel your current workplace prevents you from progressing and believe career advancement is a reason for leaving, you should switch jobs or even careers.
Furthermore, a good way to advocate for your career is to practice professional networking both within and outside the company. Informing the upper management of your aspirations can help you progress toward your goals more effortlessly.
#5. Develop Essential Skills and Competencies
Career advancement is all about continuous learning and improvement. Identifying which skills and qualifications are required for the role that you’re aiming for will make it easier for you to acquire or improve them.
For example, improving hard skills usually involves some form of formal education, coursework, certification, or on-the-job learning. On the other hand, soft skills are typically gained through experience, self-improvement, and interpersonal activities.
While both types of abilities are required for career advancement, hard skills will significantly improve your technical competence and make you an expert in your field. Soft skills, although highly valued in every role, are better suited to people-centric and managerial positions.
Keep in mind that consistently demonstrating a commitment to professional growth will also help you get the upper management’s attention, putting you on a fast track to a promotion. Plus, it improves your employability, allowing you to apply for better jobs.
When to Make Strategic Career Moves?
Making strategic career moves when you identify opportunities and getting the timing correct helps you maximize their benefits. The timing is often just as important as the actions themselves, so let’s see how you can get it right.
Identifying Growth Opportunities
Growth opportunities can come in many shapes and at any time. Knowing how to recognize and identify them is critical in seizing these opportunities and advancing your career at a rapid rate.
Some of the things to look out for include signs that you’ve outgrown your current role. If you have mastered every aspect of your job and don’t feel challenged any longer, you should look for additional responsibilities, a promotion, or a new position.
Growth opportunities can come in the form of new projects, where you can learn new skills and gain fresh experience. On the other hand, you can also grow as a professional by mentoring others. This helps solidify your knowledge while enhancing your interpersonal skills, including collaboration and communication abilities.
Making Internal vs. External Moves
Internal and external moves are both excellent ways of advancing your career. While switching jobs no longer pays off as it used to, it still results in a higher median pay increase compared to staying with the same employer in the long term.
Finding a position at a new company gives you an opportunity to make a big leap in your career with a much higher salary, additional responsibilities, and new professionals to network with.
On the other hand, progressing internally is typically easier and smoother. Since you already know the company, its culture, and values, as well as the work environment, you’ve adapted to it, and you can leverage the relationships made.
That’s why it’s critical to weigh the pros and cons of internal and external moving and choose which option is best for you in your current circumstances.
Timing Your Career Transitions
Timing your career transitions and other significant decisions can help you maximize benefits while minimizing risk. You should avoid making hasty decisions that could have negative consequences in the short or long term.
Instead, if you want to ask for a promotion, you should typically do so after completing a major project or otherwise making a big contribution within the company. Once you feel that you have the necessary skills and experience to take on more complex tasks, you can contact your supervisors or write a cover letter for a promotion and initiate the process.
You should also keep in mind the company’s current financial status and your industry’s health. Companies that are experiencing growth in a thriving sector are more likely to promote or hire you.
If You’re Transitioning to New Fields.
Transitioning to a new field and changing careers is sometimes the best way to advance, even though it can be daunting. Here are some practical tips to help you navigate the change:
Career Change Tips
Conduct a self-assessment. Before making a move as big as this, evaluate your current situation, skill and experience levels, as well as goals and motivation. This will help you determine what kind of change aligns with your long-term plans.
Research extensively. Analyze the field that you want to transition to and research the company you want to join with care. This will provide you with information on the required qualifications, the job outlook, available career paths, and how to secure the role, among other details.
Bridge skill gaps. Acquire the necessary skills needed to optimally perform in the new field to have an easier time landing your first role.
Tailor your resume. Leverage your existing skills and achievements to demonstrate how you’ll excel in the new role. If you need to explain gaps in employment, you can use the combination resume format.
Be patient. Even when you’re doing everything right, transitioning to a new field can take time. Don’t be discouraged and look at every setback as a learning experience.
Accelerate Your Career with Resume.co
Resume.co offers many invaluable tools and resources that can accelerate your career advancement and help you reach your goals more efficiently.
You can leverage our resume builder and cover letter creator to design professional documents in minutes. Both tools come with ready-made templates meticulously crafted to catch the recruiter’s eye and pass ATS screening.
Take advantage of our AI to polish your writing, emphasize your key strengths, and effortlessly tailor your resume and cover letter to the job description. And once you land an interview, you can head over to our blog for expert advice on job interviews and overall career progress.
Final Thoughts
Career advancement is important because it leads to higher salaries, better benefits, increased job satisfaction, and an improved work-life balance. That’s why this is a lifelong journey of continuous growth, development, strategizing, and decision-making.
Remember to set clear, attainable, and measurable goals, establish timelines, and continuously track your progress. By being proactive about seeking opportunities and capitalizing on them, you’ll consistently make advances that will result in massive movements in the long run and a fulfilled professional life.
