It’s important to think of our careers not only as a format for working a career, but as a brand, as a professional entity, as our reputations. This can help us secure better opportunities, give us the chance to let our work speak for itself, while also helping us reinforce our boundaries as necessary. Ultimately, the more value we provide others, the more value we can provide ourselves, and so rounding ourselves off as a professional can be great.

For instance, it’s very hard to overstate the value that learning a new language can have on your career direction. While this is hardly a simple or overnight skill to learn, investing in the parallel skills you wish to develop can not only help you become more of a prominent figure in your field, but it’s fun to achieve.

Learning and refining your capabilities as a professional keeps things fresh, and interesting, and gives you the chance to work in many different fields or locations. This way you don’t have to live to work, you can work to live.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few measures for increasing your value as a worthwhile professional:

Consider Parallel Skills Development

When we think of becoming the best professionals we can be, it’s easy to gain tunnel vision and think solely about the role you’re employed for. But it can also be that at least having a basic understanding of parallel skills within roles you’ll be working alongside can be very helpful.

For instance – if you work in a production design department on a film set, it’s a good idea to learn about lighting and the framing for particular shots. This can help you more easily design a space to help other members of your team out.

This specific example is quite unique, but the easiest to visualize. It can really apply to any role. For instance, a waiter that learns the basics of how a kitchen operates and how stock rotates can more easily communicate with the back-of-house department.

It might be that investing in public speaking leadership lessons, or following up on that placement as part of your prior work can help you learn this most necessary of skills, a skill that doesn’t come to most people naturally and thus remains desirable.

Placement Opportunities

It can be tremendously helpful to your career to make use of opportunities and placements where they exist. For instance, using travel healthcare recruitment tools can lend you a greater deal of flexibility regarding the roles you take on and how long you occupy a role such as that.

In your own career, opportunities may exist now. For instance, you may have the chance to shadow an office abroad to help consult with and measure the progress of your brand’s expansion into a new market. 

Simply showing that you’re ready and willing, or have past placement experience on your CV, can help you score opportunities from employers that look at this fondly. Of course, it’s also important to recognize that professional development should be in service of you.

Agency Work

Agency work can give you the chance to temp for many roles, which helps expand your capabilities and comfort by using your skills in a variety of situations. This might involve administrative work in different departments, or expanding your reputation in certain industries.

Simply having the first-hand experience of how many different brands operate can be absolutely key in helping you gain that diverse perspective of your industry hard to achieve elsewhere. This kind of work can also be flexible, too, which can be very useful if that’s what you’ve been looking for.

Freelancing & Consulting

Once you begin to feel confident in your professional capabilities, then using them to leverage work as an expert or experienced participant in a field can be a great idea. Consulting for startups, for instance, can be a lucrative working opportunity, helping young businesses slowly refine their output and chart their path despite having limited experience up to this point. Over time, you may be surprised just what kind of ingenious projects and people you are able to work amongst.

Freelancing can also help you define your own skills as an outsourced service. This might involve marketing outreach, web design, or any other creative field that allows you to enact your own unique flair within a brief. Freelancing and consulting are advantageous because of how flexible they are, and should your reputation grows, opportunities grow alongside it..

Learning Interpersonal Skills

As professionals, it’s true to say that our interpersonal capabilities and candor matters in levying a good impression. For instance, how we hold eye contact, how we communicate briefly and respectfully, and even the degree to which we dress appropriately for the role can help us make a good impression, but rather than trying to impress on other people, it can help us occupy our professional mindset more appropriately.

What if, for instance, a company wishes to hire you for your marketing expertise, asking you to potentially give a speech about their product at a local business convention? It might be that investing in public speaking lessons or following up on that placement as part of your prior work can help you learn this most necessary of skills, a skill that doesn’t really come to most people naturally and thus remains desirable.

An interpersonal skill might simply involve knowing and relaying how you can add value to a business carefully and confidently. It can also mean learning how to deal with testy clients, such as settling an invoice dispute and more. You’ll pick up these skills as you move forward in your career, but for the most part, a careful and attendant look at this can be worthwhile.

Finding Responsibility Where Available

It can be good to take the reigns of responsibility on where they can be found. For instance, it might be that your boss is looking for someone to head to a placement, or to help manage a team, or to go with them to another office in order to present a service or good.

Volunteering for this can help you gain valuable experience in a relatively safe position, allowing you to divert your usual responsibilities to something more gripping and interesting. It might just be that asking your employer to help cultivate your potential growth in a certain direction can help them make better use of you as an employee.

Or – perhaps you could ascertain this opportunity yourself, using your own expertise to source it. The more you can make sense of this, the better outcome you’ll get to enjoy.

Online Profile Management

Simply being reachable and accessible can lend you credit as a professional. Making a LinkedIn account or being reachable on social media can help. Putting out a professional image, such as curating your own website, can be a great boost, too. For instance, having a particular Facebook page and website for your Wedding Photography services can help you avoid the unprofessionalism of having your own personal account used for this kind of work communication.

This way, you can take a careful approach to your online profile and how it reflects on you as a professional, even if that means responding to reviews on the Google Business platform. An approach like that can work wonders and keeps you totally aware of the sort of challenges you may face.

With this advice, we believe you’ll continue to increase your value as a worthwhile professional, and benefit as a result.