It's time to excel at your job

You’ve now landed the job you worked so hard to get. So, now is the time to relax, right? Wrong!

You should never come into a new job with the mindset of ‘now is my time to relax’. This does not mean that you shouldn't set aside time to take in the positive milestone you have just hit and to congratulate yourself. In fact, it is healthy to do so. So please do. I’m also not saying that you should work yourself to the ground. Please don’t. It does not serve you and neither does it serve the organization you have just joined. Because no matter what we are led to believe, burn out is not a sign of dedication to your work; it’s a sign that you are struggling with balance in your life (we all do at some point and burnout is that reminder).

However, what I am saying is that you should approach your job with a growth mindset. This means that you are actively thinking about how you can leave a positive stamp on the role you occupy and also a lasting impact for the organization. You should be the kind of employee that people genuinely feel the department or company has lost when you depart, but are nevertheless happy for you because they know you deserve to pursue the opportunities that present themselves to you.

Seek opportunities to learn new skills

So the question is, how do you build and retain a growth mindset in your new job? One way of doing this is to always seek out opportunities to learn new things - about your role, about your company, about your industry, and about emerging job market and workforce trends.

Stay current. Why is all this important? Because according to estimates in the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, 50% of workers will need to reskill in order to keep their jobs in the next five years. The WEF report further adds that by the end of this year, i.e. 2022, 42% of core skills required to perform existing jobs are expected to change. Bottom line: if you want to continue to succeed in your job and in the job market more generally, you must seek opportunities to learn new skills.

Replace your ‘relax mindset’ with a ‘growth mindset’, and seek out opportunities to either build new skills independently or ask your employer to pay for these opportunities. Either way - whether it is you or your employer paying for the training - one question that needs to be asked is: What is the return on education (RoE)?

For your employer, the answer to the question above is that the company can clearly see the benefits that your new skills will bring to your performance in your role. While for you, the answer lies in how much more valuable (financial or otherwise) can you become as a result of acquiring these new skills.

In either scenario, data becomes a very important metric, and finding the right kind of data means moving beyond just earning a certificate of completion after your training, which doesn’t say much about whether you actually learned anything and doesn’t communicate the details of what you learned.

This is why upskhill is taking a different approach, one which focuses on building a skills ranking for you as you seek to achieve mastery across a range of skills. This skills ranking forms part of the data in what we call your ‘Skills Passport’ - a report that will contain in-depth analytics of your skills training journey across any field of your choice. This data on your progress and performance across different courses becomes the basis for which you can communicate with current or prospective employers your expertise in any industry/field.

If the idea of building a ‘Skills Passport’ to improve your job market competitiveness appeals to you, then sign up below.