You’ve perhaps taken the right steps to discovering the best career for your personality. And you’ve also to an extent developed yourself in that career path which has obviously landed you a good job. Now, the basic question is, what next? This question is apt because nothing in life is static, more so in this vast, technologically dynamic space plus very competitive society we find ourselves.

No one can afford to be static in their career, else you’d be left behind and could perhaps become irrelevant and ill-fated in your chosen career.

In today’s post, we want to consider some smart career management strategies you must adopt in order to steadily improve yourself in your career and become so useful in it, as well as the go-to person in that career field.

First off, what’s career management? Career management has got basically to do with how you personally control and manage your career development process. They’re the strategies you’ve got to adopt in order to effectively manage how you’ll advance further in your career. Having said that, let’s now consider some of the basic career management strategies you should use in order to better manage your career development efforts, while not neglecting your personality.

Key Career Management Strategies For Career Success:

1. Self-educate:

Self-education is one of the key smart career management strategies you must adopt in order to get ahead of your competitors. It’s basically the process of deliberately educating yourself and acquiring more relevant knowledge that’ll get you on the path towards emerging the as the best in your field.

Self-education can be done through online research on search engines. Downloading, purchasing and reading books, ebooks and journals that are relevant to your chosen career. With the basic mindset of gaining more professional knowledge and be ahead of your colleagues.

Every temperament can actually self- educate whether they do it remotely from their homes or outside from their home. The basic thing is to be deliberate about it, and be consistent with it. In order to effectively educate yourself and have it reflect in your career endeavors, you must jot down some important and relevant points. Then go back to reading them, and perhaps create a catalog for them that you’ll often refer back to anytime you want to update yourself.

In this digital and information age, self-education is one of the basic ways if not the best way so many people are using to learn new things and update themselves through the internet. It’s a very effective and efficient strategy you can adopt to manage your career and be ahead of others.

2. Personal Development:

Your career advancement efforts will be completely in jeopardy if you do not personally develop and improve yourself. Personal development is the process of building your personality in how you write, communicate, think relates with people, plus appear and comport yourself in public. People will often address you, first of all, according to your appearance before they’ll attempt to know who you are and what you do.

You could’ve worked hard enough to build a very good and solid career for yourself but without improving your lifestyle, you may not go far in getting to the summit of your career. You don’t want to ruin your career or let your hardwork be become an effort in futility because of some little lows in your lifestyle. Career development and advancement goes beyond just improving and advancing in your career. It encompasses all facets of your existence as a person. While you are making effort to build your career you need to also consider improving your lifestyle and attitude. It’s a very key smart strategy for effective career management.

3. Invest In Your Career:

There’s no way you can build yourself or your career without investing your money, time and resources. Career management requires some financial investments for you to be able to get to the zenith of your career. Success is about being deliberate about what you want, and knowing what you’ve got to do to achieve your goals. No one can be successful in anything without first having the desire and passion to succeed.

Personal career management is the financial commitments you’ve got to make to advance in your career and be ahead of others. You don’t need to wait for your organization to do that for you, eventhough some companies and big organizations could sometime send their staffs for some professional training and courses. But if you want to be exceptional in your job, and make your employers see you as a key assert, then you have to be financially responsible for your personal career development. Career management is a journey you must financially commit yourself to, if you really want to make yourself relevant and indispensable to your organization.

Choleric personalities plus perhaps  melancholies quite understands the importance of personally investing in their career. No wonder cholerics are always ahead of others because they are very ambitious people, who often likes to be ahead in everything. They do not need to wait for management to invest in them by sending them on courses before they’ll go for training. They simply go before others, then comes back to take challenging tasks, which consequently facilitates their promotion. Investing in your career is one of the smart career management strategy you must adopt to advance in your career.

4. Improve Your Interpersonal Skill:

Interpersonal skills is one of the basic soft skill many organizations requires from job seekers. This skill is essential to build interpersonal relationships with other staffs in order to achieve the organization’s goals and objective. Without a good interpersonal skills, interpersonal working relationship with others will be difficult, and this will negatively impact on your career development pursuit.

Thus, improving your interpersonal skills is another important career management strategy you must adopt in order to holistically build your career and achieve career success. Sanguines and Phlegmatics may not have much problem relating very well with others. But sanguines must show more seriousness, discipline and also diligence to work, while phlegmatics must learn to make sacrifices and courageous enough to take on new challenges.

As for cholerics and melancholies, cholerics have got the least developed interpersonal skills, they must sure work on that if they want to achieve career success. Melancholies have got all the qualities they require to excel in their career, including the basic interpersonal skill. But they certainly need to work on their moodiness, pessimistic and perfectionist traits, which often tends to become a clog in their wheel of career advancement.

5. Build Connections:

Human beings are made to connect with one another. No one is an island, or can exist in isolation. It’s for this reason that you must endeavor to build your connection and connect with others who may or may not be directly linked with the same career field as you. As you can see, the world has now become a global village since you no longer necessarily need to physically be with people or see them before conversation could take place.

Networking has become easier since the Advent of internet, and now the social media. A lot of persons are now leveraging on the social networking sites as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc to build links and stay connected with their friends, family or colleagues. For you as a career person, who wants to advance in your career, the best social media platform you ought not to neglect is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is where career enthusiast and professionals like you are found. They use it to build relationship and connect with other professionals in their field. From there, you can also know what people in your industry are doing, and keep yourself up to date of  trending and emerging trends in your career.

Building connections around your industry is another smart career management strategy you must adopt in order to advance in your career and reach the summit of it.

6. See And Take Advantage of Opportunities:

One of the smart career management strategy you must intentionally fuse into your career development plans is, to see and take advantage of every  opportunity you’ve got to advance your career before others. Different opportunities are often presented to us perhaps sometimes unknowingly, for we to leverage on, and get our career to the next level. But how fast we’re able to identify these various opportunities and take advantage of them, is what makes us different from others, plus gets us high-up there easily.

Passing over opportunities repeatedly is rarely a smart attitude or lifestyle for anyone that’s desirous of attaining career success. It’ll not only make you regret not taking action when you’re supposed to, but will also leave you unfulfilled and unaccomplished as an individual. Every opportunity you’ve got to broaden or deepen your career is definitely not to be neglected or toiled with, if  you want to be very impactful in your career.

7. Manage Your Temperament Weaknesses:

Every temperament has got different weaknesses and strengths. It’s very pertinent that while you’re utilizing your temperament strengths to build your career, you’ve got to also identify the inherent weaknesses associated with your basic temperament and know how to manage them.

Some of the weaknesses of different temperaments that negatively affects their career:

The sanguine’s major weakness that often negatively affects their career advancement, is their impulsiveness, indiscipline, plus lack of commitment and steadfastness. Sanguines needs to work on themselves in these areas. For cholerics, they’ve got everything it takes to succeed and get to the zenith of their career. But they must manage some their temperament weaknesses of poor interpersonal relationship, inconsiderateness, high-handedness and aggression.

For Melancholies, just like cholerics, they’ve got the wherewithal to reach the acme of their career regardless. But they must have a more optimistic outlook on life, work on their mood swings, learn to be less critical and more appreciative of themselves and others, and lastly, melancholies must realize that humans aren’t perfect being, so always expecting hundred percent from everyone may often get them depressed easily. As for typical phlegmatics, though very patient and organized personalities, but they must as a matter of fact be very courageous and dogged in going for what they desire, plus be more decisive and resolute about it. Majority, if not all of the phlegmatic’s temperament weaknesses tends to affect mainly his leadership and parenting endeavors.

However, every temperament must learn how to manage their individual temperament weaknesses that affects their lifestyles through interactions and influence.

Conclusively, every temperament has got what it takes to succeed in any career they choose as long it conforms with their basic temperament. But they must do well to identify their individual weaknesses and make efforts towards ameliorating them in order to clear any impediments on their way towards advancing their careers.