Building a career requires you to develop skills, contacts and experience throughout your life in order to become increasingly knowledgeable and reliable in a given industry. To do this, you need to devote hundreds of hours to learning, dozens of weeks to on-the-job experience, and many years to the development of your professional profile. This article looks at career-building from a slightly different angle — that of the home-worker. The tips provided below are specially selected to help encourage those who work from home to still keep an eye on their career — using sound decision-making to enhance their prospects with time.
Build a Contact Book
There’s no reason why you can’t network when working from home. The problem, of course, is that you’re not in an office every day in which customers, clients and managers are constantly passing through. You’re less able, therefore, to attract people and network with them on an everyday basis — but there are still two fundamental ways in which you can impress those around you, and build a solid contact book for future work.
The first is simply through strengthening of your work. If you started a business that is turning over a promising amount of cash, you’re going to impress people who hear about it. The same can be said for freelance writers, designers and even artists — the strength of your work will enchant people. The second method to network when working from home is even more simple — go to meetings, workshops and conferences in your area of expertise. As a home-worker, you’ll be excited and invigorated by chatting with dozens of people with your skillset and interests.
Study as You Work
When you work from home, you might sometimes be under the impression that you’re going nowhere — that you’ve reached the peak of your powers, and that your wage and experience isn’t going to shift a great deal from this point in your life. This is certainly a negative standpoint from which to survey your life — and, actually, one of the great benefits of working from home is that you can be incredibly flexible with your working hours.
As such, you’ll be able to find the time to study a university course — also from home — at the same time as performing your work from home duties. Online courses — like RMIT’s online MBA — are the perfect way to add a solid and employable string to your bow while at the same time earning cash through the job your perform on a regular basis. It’s easy to enrol, and you’ll leave more qualified and inspired than you arrived.
Look for Opportunities
Everyone’s reached a job search saturation point at which they’re so exhausted from trawling through websites that they’d rather just stick, however miserably, in their current position at work. The truth is — job searching is difficult. It requires you to update your resume, to write numerous cover letters, and to build online profiles on job sites.
Nevertheless, job searching should be seen as a regular and consistent form of work for anyone who works from home. If you do happen to unearth the perfect job, then you’ll be able to apply for it in good time. If you don’t, you’ll still be understanding the state of the job market, and the quality of jobs that are out there at present. One tip here is to create a LinkedIn account, and to make sure it links to your online profiles and portfolios or websites elsewhere. It’s a great way to network and job search in an easy-to-use layout for business professionals.
Never Give Up on Ambition
Whatever it is you do from home, you should take a moment whenever you’re feeling a bit lost and despondent to realize just how difficult it can be to work solely from home. It is challenging in quite unique ways — and your resilience and aptitude is a big reason why you’re still firing on all cylinders and making waves in your chosen industry. Whether you work for a business from home, you work on freelance projects, or you are building your own company piece by piece, take a moment to respect your hard-working life.
The key here is to realize what an asset your self-discipline is. There’s a reason not so many people tend to work from home — because if they were to do so, they’d lose motivation and drive, and would prefer the office environment to what’s there at home. By being able to weather that particular storm and make a success of home working, you’re doing yourself credit — and showing you have great personal discipline and determination to be ambitious.
Branch Out
One of the more common reasons that people quit their jobs is because they feel they’re stagnating. They complain of a lack of upward mobility in their company, or a sense that they’re coasting through their career, not really encountering challenges and puzzles to solve. The very same might well trouble you as you work from home — you might consider yourself down a cul-de-sac from which you’d like to emerge. Well, this article has one important piece of advice for you in that case: branch out.
Find a completely new activity. It doesn’t matter what the pay is for this kind of work, or whether you think the skills you gain from performing it will be valuable to you in the future — sometimes, it’s simply nice to have that variation, and new challenges to pull you out of the comfort zone that you’ve eased a little too deep inside of. Remember that vitality and joy are all parts of working hard, and that if you feel you’re not quite extracting what you need from your working life, you will always have the opportunity to completely change tack and head in a new direction — bringing all of your accrued skills with you, of course.
These tips are aimed at home workers looking to get ahead in life by making business-smart decisions that’ll propel them into more promising and exciting futures.
