What is one thing to do for your career when getting ready for the new year?
To help you make strides in your career at the start of the year, we asked entrepreneurs and business professionals this question for their best insights. From organizing your inbox to reevaluating your five-year plan, there are several ideas that may help you plan the next steps in your career.
Here are 11 things to do for your career when getting ready for the new year:
- Shake Things Up and Get Disruptive
- Organize Your Inbox
- Evaluate Your Performance and Mental Health
- Reflect on Your Career Milestones
- Reevaluate Your Five-Year Plan
- Reach Out to Old Managers
- Create a Goal for the Year
- Assess if You Are Ready for Career Growth
- Commit to Learning New Skills
- Work on Your LinkedIn Profile
- Conduct an Annual Career Evaluation
Shake Things Up and Get Disruptive
The New Year is definitely a time for self-reflection when you almost instinctively take a long, hard look back at different situations and outcomes from the past year and pivot accordingly for the year ahead.
The beginning of the year is a wonderful time to feel rejuvenated and even disruptive. It’s like a blank slate. So go ahead, shake things up a little in your space and even seek out new opportunities for growth.
Greg Gillman, MuteSix
Organize Your Inbox
After the New Year, the last thing I’d want to face is a cluttered inbox. To start 2022 off right, organize your inbox before the holiday break.
Unsubscribe from newsletters, create tags, audit folders, and request to be removed from group messages that do not apply to you. Returning to work with an organized inbox will relieve stress and help you take on the New Year.
Adrian James, Markitors
Evaluate Your Performance and Mental Health
A good idea at every turn of the year is to evaluate your previous year’s performance, your mental health and reevaluate your goals. It is always important to ensure what you are doing is making you happy and still what you are passionate about.
If at the end of year evaluation, you realize you are not happy with your current job or in general, you should take steps to figure out if this is due to your career or other personal reasons.
Jonathan Finegold, MedCline
Reflect on Your Career Milestones
As the year ends and a new one begins, reflect on your career wins in the past twelve months to help you gain perspective for your goals in the coming year. Review the strategies you did that led you to certain milestones. Appreciate how far you’ve gone in your career, then start envisioning where you want to take it next year.
Brogan Renshaw, Firewire Digital
Reevaluate Your Five-Year Plan
One thing to do before the new year is to re-evaluate your five-year plan and your goals from the past year. What goals were achieved, and which ones fell short? Based on the previous year’s plan, you can create short and long-term goals and new ideas to motivate your success into the new year.
If a promotion is on your radar for 2022, what do you need to do to get there? Re-evaluating and creating an action plan is the first step.
Lance Herrington, UNICO Nutrition
Reach Out to Old Managers
One thing you can do for your career when getting ready for the New Year is to reach out to your old managers and ask them how they are doing. It is great to stay connected with old managers, as you never know when you might need them to serve as a reference for you in the future.
Do your best to reconnect with these people over the New Year and ask them how their holidays were and what they have been up to. This will go a long way in building these relationships and will set your career up in a good direction moving forward.
John Wu, Gryphon Connect
Create a Goal for the Year
If you want to avoid stagnancy in your career, you need to have goals to aim for each year. Whether it’s to increase your paycheck by a certain amount, work more flexible hours, or find a job with better training opportunities, it’s always a good idea to have an objective you can work towards.
Think of it as a cycle of incremental improvements that you begin anew every time the year comes to a close. Start by setting targets you can realistically hit, work your way towards them over the following year, and then evaluate your progress before the next cycle so that you can create new goals or adjust your existing ones.
Johannes Larsson, Entrepreneur
Assess if You Are Ready for Career Growth
Career-wise, one thing you can do to prepare for the New Year is to assess your performance and establish grounds to seek professional development opportunities.
By doing so, you give yourself a picture of your professional goals for the upcoming year. Whether you are ready to grab career growth opportunities will depend on your assessment and performance. It will help you decide on your next moves for professional fulfillment.
Lisa Richards, The Candida Diet
Commit to Learning New Skills
One thing to do for your career when getting ready for the New Year is to take a course. It could be a free course that’s truly beneficial or a paid course that teaches you something new.
If you’re an I.T. specialist, for example, you could take a course in Web Development and look at specialized areas you may not have thought of. If you work at a large company, this is one way to bring innovative ideas that work for the whole team. If you own a business, this can boost your recognition in the field and bring it to greater heights.
Meika Hibbert, Working Momspiration
Work on Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn can be a boon for networking professionals to find relevant job searches, expand their network and seek out the top-notch talent within their industry. However, in order to have a credible and winning profile, it requires a fair amount of time and a careful eye for detail.
For this reason, it would be a stellar New Year’s resolution for most individuals to commit to working on their LinkedIn profile, updating their skills and expertise, and taking the time to craft well-thought-out profile descriptions. At the same time, you could use the start of the year to plan out the kind of content that you’d like to create and curate on your feed.
Sam Santa, Zeitholz
Conduct an Annual Career Evaluation
I like to get a general overview of how my career went in the past year. I try to make it as systematic as possible by listing factors that have a high impact on business — for example, establish your goals and your measures for achieving them, the end results, the biggest wins of the year, and scenarios that put you in the losing end and your takeaways.
Doing an evaluation will give you a clear understanding of how much you and your business have grown and help you cite ways to improve for the following year.
Kathryn McDavid, Editor’s Pick
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