By 
Everybody is looking to climb the career ladder in some way, now while a lot of people may try to be friends with their manager or flutter their eyelashes to help them get that promotion (and for a lot of people that will work), getting promoted on merit is always so much better than promotion based on nepotism. After all, your contacts in the office are only likely to stretch so far and when the owner of the company or the MD is making their decisions then they may not factor in that you are best pals with one of the directors, so make sure that you have the traits and performance to back it up.
Although this also takes far more time and dedication, as well as skill at the job itself, ultimately it will pay off in terms of not just your prospects within the company that you work for currently but also for your future job opportunities which you should also be considering at this stage in your career. So here are a few things that you can do to help your prospects and get noticed.
Asking for an evaluation
A pretty courageous feat that requires some careful thought and honest dissection of yourself, you are essentially by doing this a huge bull’s-eye on your chest for your manager to actively remind you of and capitalize on where you are not performing well and where you need to improve to make your prospects within the company more promising. And while some of this criticism won’t feel particularly great at the time, it will have two lasting and important outcomes. The first being it will actively show you where you need to improve yourself and/or your skills and conduct in order to climb the vine of the office so to speak.
The second is that it displays to higher management that you’re very serious improving and developing yourself and by extension, the company; if you are showing willingness to change then more often than not management will show willingness to give you a chance at dealing with more responsibilities in the office. Make sure however that you seem genuine in your efforts and don’t ask for an evaluation 20 minutes after your boss declares that there is a position open, as this just smacks of trying to get in with them only because of the promotion and not because of any desire to working hard.
Developing your skills and conduct
Particularly in an office environment, you are pretty much as trusted and useful as what you can offer the business in terms of practical skills, whether these be applied skills like web design and marketing, or whether they be more general soft skills such as sales and customer interaction, they are extremely important to easily display your usefulness to your employer and what their plans are. For you to appear as an invaluable asset rather than a drag on the team you have to develop skills that apply nicely in the office. And one of the things that are always useful to the office environment is, unsurprisingly, Microsoft program skills.
The use of excel to make up a self-calculating spreadsheet to work out ROI of a particular investment, PowerPoint skills top make truly amazing presentations and charts, the list of applications for Office is never ending, and even a new kid on the block that is taking offices from all kinds of industries by storm, Microsoft Projects. So why not show your employers that you’re willing to step up and find a Microsoft Project training and courses provider.
Kick out Procrastination
Procrastination is a disease that is deadly to career prospects, it’s something that may not seem so bad in the moment but in reality, it’s probably one of the main reasons that your boss isn’t looking your direction when the pay rises get dished out. Your conduct in the office speaks way more about you than your work itself. This is a problem for those of us who suffer from lazy bouts as that kind of behavior in the office doesn’t go unnoticed and the last thing that management wants is another lazy director. And all it takes to pull yourself out of that is the motivation to actually work on the more tedious stuff in your day.
