You are born free to succeed and live life to the fullest; this is the inexorable axiom of human life. When all things in nature are conditioned to grow, blossom, and bear fruit, human beings cannot be left behind. However, left to itself, and without due conditioning and care the blossoming of nature would be less than adequate.

The principle of career advancement for human beings is necessarily conditioned on the self-same principles of adequate care and conditioning, i.e., the creation of upskilling and developing new skills to commence the process of fast-tracking your career enhancement. And, the time is NOW.

Top 10 Tips to Fast Track Your Career

This list is not exhaustive but, essentially,  indicative of a sense of direction to be proceeded with.

1. Know Yourself:

Self-knowledge is the basic and most important tip for fast-tracking your career advancement. You may have, unwittingly, downgraded your strengths and so faltered at the starting point. To correct such a situation, you could supplement your self-assessment with pointers and assistance from well-meaning colleagues, family, and friends. A written collation of the findings is important, and a simple way to begin identifying the career path you want to choose. Be aware that you are at the Career Development Stage.

2. Ramp up Your Strengths: 

Having dispassionately assessed your strengths, you proceed to ramp up these strengths. The flip side of the coin of strengths is your weaknesses. Identify, focus, and proceed to find ways and means of strengthening or ramping up your strengths simultaneously letting go of the weaknesses. You must remember, that you cannot be good at everything so trying to “improve” weaknesses will only contribute negatively. 

3. Find Your Passion and Values:

You need to enjoy what you are doing or else it would be a life of total drudgery. Career advancement or growth is not just for making money; it is for making money enjoyably. Some searching questions here are: What do I enjoy doing? What aptitudes are predominant in my personality? Answers to these questions need not be easy but are strictly relevant if you have to zero in to ascertain your passion and the attendant core values in your life. You enjoy what you are passionate about and fast-tracking your career growth will be a source of joy spurring you onwards.

4. Be in Total Control:

Control for the sake of control is futile and will lead you nowhere. Control,  as a tool to fast track your career growth,  is a matter of strict discipline; practice makes perfect. All your aptitudes and passion left to itself will not achieve the desired results of career growth unless these are constantly “cultivated” – as a vinedresser prunes the vines to produce vintage grapes. This calls for dedicated discipline and commitment. For sustained career growth just good is not good enough; you need to be great and only that establishes mastery and the sweet taste of fabulous success.

5. Focus, Focus, Focus:

At this exploratory stage of your fast-tracking of career growth, you need to be particularly wary of dissipation. The cardinal principle here is the focus.  This, again, calls for discipline and prudent “testing” the optimum use of your aptitudes and inherent abilities. An area for testing this could be your place of work or even at home or involvement in community service. These are some of the areas that throw up definite indicators of what you love to do and so performance becomes dedicated and creative.  Creativity is a sure indicator of a trend to set up your career path that needs to be fast-tracked. 

6. Be in touch with Your Gut Feeling:

Being sensitive to your “gut feeling” simply means being receptive to what your heart is saying to you. Sometimes, it may sound illogical to your mental process and thinking, but at this exploratory stage of your career growth, responding to heart tugs could lead you to fortune and fame. Remember  – you are searching………

7. Constant Moderation and Sobriety:

Enthusiasm is the elixir of life, however, be warned that elixir in excess is intoxicating. If not disciplined and composed, enthusiasm could lead to unexpected disasters. There is a human tendency to impress those around so you could run the risk of over promise and under delivery.

The practice of constant moderation and sobriety calls for reserves of discipline and enables you to build in buffer time. This reverses the oft-repeated human tendency referred to above and is impressive to those around.

8. Pause and Think Before You Speak: 

An excellent fall-out of constant moderation and sobriety is the tendency to pause and think before you speak. This is an excellent quality to develop and here you follow in the footsteps of illustrious contemporaries. Intelligent minds like Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos embrace the Rule of Awkward Silence. You should too. The rule of awkward silence has always been valuable. But in a world of instant gratification, it’s more useful than ever. When you pause and think before you speak, you say what you mean and mean what you say.

9. Develop Positive Communication Skills: 

There is no gainsaying that positive communication skills are the hallmark of a successful human being. Communication enables you to share with others your thoughts and what you wish to convey. To communicate skillfully is to communicate positively. A simple example will bring out the effects e.g., “ This room is too hot.” You have stated a fact and your hearer treats that as a complaint. Instead, you say “ Please turn on the air conditioner.” This is correctly understood as a request and is gracious and attractive.

10. Raising the Bar of All Skills:

A very important tip in the fast-tracking of your career growth is a continuous learning process of upgrading everything that you do well. The continuous learning process is vital and is inextricably intertwined with every required skill. A few suggestions:

a. Communication Skills: Acknowledge the person rather than compliment the thing. 

b. Care of Self: Judicious allocation of work and rest times.

c. Upskill Digitally: A few examples of these would be 

1. touch typing
2. efficient and familiar with MS Office.
3. positive and judicious use of social media.
4. diligent networking.
5. paying attention to aesthetics

Conclusion

Paramount to the process of fast-tracking career growth is the anatomy of Career Development Stages. These stages can be understood as follows:

1. Exploration.
2. Mid-Career.
3. Late-Career.
4. Decline.

Fast-tracking your Career Growth is challenging and a culture of continuous learning, discipline, and strict self-assessment is called for. It is, certainly, not for the faint-hearted; it calls for reserves of deep-seated concentration and dedication to achieve set goals. Arduous, though this may appear in theory, remember that you are pursuing a goal based on your passion and values in life.  And, what you so passionately desire in life can never be arduous, but a thing of joy.  An interplay of passion, dedication, discipline, and life values brings about the blossoming of your personality that benefits not only you but also the persons you are networking with. Once the process of fast-tracking your career growth is properly set in motion, you are the master of every situation and you can change gears depending on the stage you are in at any given time. Finally, to achieve anything, you need to begin.