How to Use New Abilities to Grow Your Career?

New abilities are a bit problematic sometimes because they seem so useless especially when you’ve been doing things in your own way.

Courtesy: movieweb.com

See, when working for a company or organization you might be sent to a weekend workshop or seminar and your boss expects you to come back with all this unreal capacity! A safe tip would be that you take notes the entire session and make friends, because you’ll never know how inadequate you’ll feel after you get back to work and you have forgotten all the emotions, knowledge and thoughts that you were supposed to have gotten… it always happens! And worst if you will have to explain it to your colleagues later.

So, you learned new things and don’t know how to integrate them into your routine?

Let’s imagine that you took a seminar (in campus, online or from a book) and you’ve learned about a new software that may simplify your work, your life… but taking the time to adapt it may be painful, either because you need to put all the data in or because you need to linked it with your current work. If you use an agenda (YOU SHOULD), mark the process down… safe some hours during the week to get use to this software in question. Don’t rush into it, but hurry up and apply such knowledge. Remember that practice makes the master!

I remember one specific job I had when I was still studying; we had a seminar on how to use quality control manager software for packaging… I was very young and very IT literate (because I’m from the generation of the transition from paper into technology) but some of my colleagues were struggling with such things that I thought were simple because they were from a different generation… at the end of the seminar, I was the only person who understood the way it worked; and I remember my boss overcharging me with work because the others didn’t get it, and the company started thinking on replacing part of the personnel… I honestly felt bad and kind of had a target on my back; so I proposed to my boss that I could simplify the seminar into some steps by steps handmade guide… He agreed on it and let me work on this ‘guide’ for one week. I can’t tell you how enthusiastic I was at the moment since I felt I was doing something super important for the company. By Friday I had the guide ready and I handed it to him. After that experience, the company used to have different seminars related to the publishing sector and I was the one in charge to make the simplify guides for everyone else, including my boss. Let me tell you that jealousy came around but I was so into the learning and applying process that I didn’t mine; and then some of these people (older than me) came to thank me because as they expressed themselves, ‘my job saved their job’.

Sometimes you will need to put new abilities in work that may resemble the ones you are already using, is never bad to learn different ways of doing the same thing! Is also healthy in case you have different people around you. You know how to use the network, don’t you? eventually you can coach some of them to help them out.

Just remember these simple tips:

• Put into the agenda practicing hours and research: there are infinite sources of knowledge online that you can get advantage from. Have you heard of www.coursera.org ? Where you can get free courses for free, and some of those courses you can get a certification as well.
• Get in touch with professionals with the ability in question: let’s say that you are learning all about marketing because you want but you don’t really need it in your job; you can provide such services as volunteer to some entrepreneurs friends or family and once you’ve practice it enough, then you can start offering such services to real clients. (You really need to know how it works before charging for it)
• Get into career coaching: you can either pay for a face to face interaction or look around and check for free books PDF step by step options, as well as video conferences and more.
• Don’t underestimate the power of a professional consultation: it can bring so much peace to your mind because all the things you are struggling to know, they might already have it in place, ready to be shared!

Remember to appreciate the efforts of new abilities; they are usually there to open doors in your professional present and future!

Share