Achieving career success is usually viewed as a linear progression, where each component is developed independently. However, true success stems from the harmonious interplay of the six essential elements listed and defined last week: Potential, Skill, Talent, Career, Ambition, and Success. Understanding the workings and intricacies of these components can help us all unlock our full potential for lasting career success.
Starting right at the foundation, we’ll consider potentials. As defined last week, the potential is your inborn untapped quality in its raw form. It is like a rough diamond just found in the dirt before the transformation power of polishing hits it. Potentials may not necessarily be natural gifts but also personal challenges or societal problems you face. By this, I mean potentials may become peculiar to you as a challenge that has woken something up inside you to act upon. Remember, problems are opportunities for innovation, therefore every career individual needs to be intentional about self-discovery. Discovering yourself, observing your organisation or community, and observing what trends globally open us up to vast opportunities.
Having discovered your potential and the problems it can solve personally, locally, nationally, and globally, you will realise there is a need to acquire more knowledge or technical know-how to perform the required tasks. One can compare this process to polishing the diamond, which entails patience, humility, submission, and willingness to learn and excel. Skill acquisition is the process of refining your potential through knowledge and technical expertise. Because your skills are the tools needed to transform potential into tangible results, developing those relevant to you fosters talent growth. Therefore, this step in the success cycle must not be overlooked or left to guesswork. Moreover, a professional can return to this at any stage in their career because the need for continuous learning or upskilling is often situational. It’s the outcome of this process that is usually called talent.
Interestingly, talent emerges when potential meets skill. This fusion enables individuals to excel in specific areas, setting them apart from others. Therefore, talent is not as innate as we used to believe because people not born with certain types of talent can also cultivate them through dedication and continuous skill development. Also known as skilled potential, talent is the outcome of the synergy between potential and skill. It’s bound to emerge from your training and other self-development paths. A talented individual then becomes a professional on the job due to expertise defined by years of experience and work excellence.
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Therefore, a career is formed by those daily activities that take up the bulk of your waking moments over an extended period. It provides a platform for talent expression and skill application. It often evolves as you grow, with your talents refined through experience. Then, you may wonder about the role of ambition in all of this. Ambition is that factor or catalyst that converts a career into success, and here is how. It represents the driving force behind a set of goals or dreams desired to achieve success, which is opposed to being mediocre at what you do by going with the flow or achieving the bare minimum. Where there are no goals in place, ambition drives you to set some realistically; once those are accomplished, new and higher ones replace them. So, ambition fuels your pursuit of success through dreams and accomplishments that propel you forward to achieve more. It can be nurtured through career experiences, successes, and even setbacks. It is wrong for your ambition to remain on your mind, head, or lips. Your ambition should make you draw out a career plan that is necessary for its realisation. You would agree that every business owner must have a business plan; likewise, everybody working must have a career plan that changes or improves as they progress. It will only be possible to succeed careerwise with such a plan.
Having explained the interconnectedness of the components of the success wheel, please note that clarity is crucial for this growth and progress. The world is undergoing economic crises that have increased competition for available resources and opportunities. The population explosion and technological advancements, amongst other factors, have also made it almost impossible to achieve significant career growth without intentionality, adaptability, and strategy. More than ever, there are certain career progressions that can no longer be winged because they will only fall on any laps that seek and prospect for them with deliberate actions. Things can no longer be left to chance or grow organically; there is a degree of intentionality that is commensurate with an expected outcome that must be displayed for a certain level of career success to happen.
Also, to advance in your career, you need to be adaptable as you move along on your career journey. Adaptability in this context reflects your capacity to be receptive and flexible to situations, which includes your readiness to evolve and transform things and lives in response to opportunities. In this case, the opportunities may come in the form of challenges or problems that you are willing to solve through innovation.
Lastly, career advancement or success may become hazy without a strategy. For you to be intentional and adaptable, there is a need for a template to identify, form, prompt, and guide you for positive and expected outcomes. This strategy is a reference point in the form of a document or plan that shows your career blueprint. This blueprint enables you to document your targets, such as where you want to be at the peak of your career. It also helps you identify steps to achieve the target through objectives. These objectives are broken down into smaller goals further with realistic timelines. What this blueprint does for a career champion is that it creates an awareness of the need to meet a target, which spurs deliberate actions with calculated moves to achieve it. Moreover, it helps the individual track their progress and re-evaluate their plans vis the current situation at each given time. Embracing this framework empowers professionals to navigate their careers with purpose and direction. It also helps to unlock potentials, cultivate talents, and drive success.
A call to action:
Career success through enhancement, as explained above, is undoubtedly a critical aspect of career health. However, this dimension will be incomplete without a test of its resilience. So, when you read career resilience, what jumped right at you? Please email your responses to [email protected].
Olayinka Opaleye is a Wellbeing Specialist and Corporate Wellness Strategist. She can also be reached via Tel: 09091131150 or by clicking on www.linkedin.com/in/olayinkaopaleye
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