The Ultimate Guide to Career Growth

Ideas for attaining career satisfaction.

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According to the dictionary, a career is an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress. Your career — whether as a small business owner or as an employee working for someone else plays an integral role in your life. You spend most of your waking hours on activities related to your work. To start with, out of the seven days in the week, you dedicate at least five days towards your work. In the 24 hours we have in each day, if you sleep for about 6 hours, your work takes a significant part of the remaining 18 hours. Except, if you take Tim Ferris’ four-hour workweek literarily, you will agree with me that your career consumes a significant amount of your time.

Different people have different views about their careers. Some see it as only a means to an end. Granted, you begin a job to make money to take care of yourself and your family. If your objective about a career is only about making money, it will be difficult for you to really have any career satisfaction. Because as soon as you joined company A, which offered you $A, you found out that company B is paying $A+$B for the same job. You manage to make your way into company B, only to realize that yet there is another company C, that will pay you $A+$B+$C. Chasing money alone is an unending (rabid) endeavor that will put you in a continuous spiral whereby you have no satisfaction with what you do.

There is a better way to think about your career. I am not minimizing the role or the importance of money in our profession, but if we must have satisfaction with our career, opportunities for progress should be at the center of our motivation. In this piece, I am sharing five ways to rethink your career so that you can enjoy it and grow in it.

1. Solve problems: Every business exists to solve a problem, whether through products or services. To enjoy your career, you need to make sure that you are passionate about the problem your business exists to solve. For example, if you are someone that cares about solving the problem of hunger in the world. If you start a business around food supply or work in a company that provides food for people, your passion for making sure that no one goes to bed hungry will help you connect and find purpose in your job. If you can connect with the problem your business is solving, there is a high chance that you will be motivated to get up every morning to go to work and enjoy the work.
2. Connection & community: Your career provides a unique opportunity to connect with other like-minded people. If you can build a strong, friendly, and meaningful network with the people that you meet at work, you will derive benefits that money cannot buy. Your connection can prove to be a great pool of resources that you can call upon whenever you need to brainstorm or exchange ideas. Having the right people within your network will further enhance your success and progress in life as you develop long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with others.
3. Fulfillment: When we make a career or business decision solely based on the amount of money we will make, we are missing the point. We are saying that our happiness does not matter. We are saying that the joy and satisfaction that we ought to get from accomplishing meaningful work is irrelevant. You should rethink your career by ensuring that you do work that not only motivates you but also brings a sense of fulfillment to you.
4. A path for progress: Your career must offer you the opportunity for advancement. You must encounter healthy doses of challenges from your work, you must be learning new things and gaining useful skills in your career. The path to progress implies that you have opportunities to take on higher responsibilities, attract more customers, and ultimately make more money. If you are in a dead-end career, with no growth potential, you should do yourself a favor by quitting that job or business and look for something new that will give you the needed opportunity for growth.
5. Rewarding Experience: Your career must bring benefits and rewards to you for you to have a long and satisfying career life. It must be able to sustain your lifestyles and provide all your basic necessities. Your career should also open more doors to bring newer clients, newer opportunities, and newer learning experience to you. That experience is something that money will not be able to buy for you.

Your career choice is a crucial decision. You should not let money alone be the only deciding factor when making your career move. Chasing money alone is a never-ending game that will not lead to satisfaction. If job satisfaction is one of your career goals, then you should leverage the points presented in this piece.