5 Tips to Help You Stay on Top of Your Career.
Save words or praise, track your work, and use these other
simple tech tricks and tips to organize and manage your career
Negotiating a salary, promoting your own
achievement, networking—these career-related activities aren't simple or
easy. But they are necessary. Organized people often have some neat
tips and tricks for staying on top of their professional development and
helping them advance their careers. Here are five that I personally
use.1. Save the Praise
I have a folder in my email called "Praise and Feedback" (I've also heard it called a "brag folder") where I file away messages from my boss or other people in my organization when they tell me I've done a good job. I also like to save there emails containing critical feedback that should ideally influence how I work.
When it's time to prepare for my annual review, I go through that
folder to remind myself of successes that I've had throughout the year.
In my experience, managers really appreciate when you do a lot of the
work of writing your evaluation.
Of course, the success stories logged in email are only those that other
people have noticed, and probably aren't comprehensive of all the work
you've accomplished in a year, which bring me to tip number 2.2. Track Your Work
I use a to-do list and a spreadsheet to keep track of all the work I complete. The to-do list has very clearly defined tasks, and I rely on it day-to-day and hour-to-hour. The spreadsheets, however, are where I keep a record of finished work. (I explain in more detail what these spreadsheets contain and how I manage them in an article called "How to Manage Your Work With Spreadsheets.")
As with saving emails of praise, tracking your work gives you quick and immediate access to hard data that can be used to prove you're doing a good job.
3. Manage Relationships
I'm actually pretty terrible at managing professional relationships and networking, so I rely on technology help me in this area. Sometime around 2006, I gave up on business cards completely. They had long been a source of frustration for me—I could catalog and digitize them to my heart's content, only to look someone up two years later and get a bounce-back email saying they were no longer with the company.
LinkedIn became my de facto Rolodex instead. My favorite thing about LinkedIn is that it's up to each person to keep his or her contact information and company affiliation up to date. Sure, not everyone does, but it is highly beneficial for them to do so. A lot of business opportunities have come my way because I have an active LinkedIn profile where people can find me and read a little bit about what I do.
LinkedIn is what I use in lieu of business cards, but there are other tools that help with real relationship management, too. Xobni, which is "inbox" spelled backward, is probably the best example. It's a plug-in for Gmail and Outlook that gives you detailed stats and information about the people behind all your emails. (There are mobile apps for iPhone and Android as well, although they have a different name: Smartr Contacts.)
4. Get the Right Salary
When it comes to your salary, every dollar counts, especially at your first job. That's because your salary history functions as the ballpark for your next job's salary. If it's too low, it can seriously hinder your ability to negotiate.
Glassdoor is one of my favorite websites for getting insider information about salaries. Sign up for a free account, and you can see salaries that people have self-reported (anonymously) at different companies, for job titles, at different experience levels, and even within certain geographic regions.
5. Review Your Review
Back on the subject of annual reviews, one of the best ways to prepare is to look over your review from last year to see what goals you had set and whether your boss asked you to try and improve anything in particular. Of course, reviewing your old review a few days before the next review doesn't exactly give you much time to act.
pcmag.
