3 Powerful Ideas to Add Value to Your Career

Who is the ultimate responsible for our own professional growth? Some people might say that the organization for which they work, some others that it is their leaders. It is true that advancing and growing in a career is a combined effort between organization’s design and leadership. But, should we exclusively depend on them? 

We live in an environment of limited resources and hypercompetition. Millions of people and companies are doing exactly the same things we are doing. Everyone is fiercely competing against each other, whether they know it or not, in order to get the attention that somebody else is getting. In such a reality, it is unequivocal to say that the number one responsible for our own professional growth must be us. 

The so called competitive advantages don’t really exist anymore as they did in the past. People, customers and companies have access to all the information they want, which makes it very difficult to sustain any of those advantages. Today, anybody can build newer and better competitive advantages.

So, if it is true that millions of people around us are doing similar work that we are doing and that they are competing for our customers, our jobs or to implement faster and more effectively new ideas, how can we advance faster and stronger? How can we add more value to others (our customers, companies, startups) so that we, at the same time, become more valuable to them? How do we remain relevant? What do we need to do? 

Even though I consider training plans, exposure opportunities, academic training and setting goals as part of our professional growth process, I want to propose three simpler and more powerful ideas to add value to our careers. 

Ask the tougher questions

Curiosity and creativity are on demand, and expertise is on decline. As I mentioned before, competitive advantages based on expertise about a topic are not as important anymore. Why? Because the increasing amount of knowledge and information about that particular topic and the pace of change make expertise about it obsolete almost overnight. 

The one key that adds more value to our professional careers is becoming an “expert inquisitor”. It is not any type of questions that we should ask. Rather, adding value to our careers mean learning the type of questions that will make our companies become more profitable, our clients more successful, or our startups more sustainable.

It is time to prove our expertise, not by reciting all that we know, but by asking the questions that unveil truths that nobody else knows. While our competition is trying to master and become experts in a specific idea (that might be proven wrong tomorrow)... we are increasing our questioning abilities    

Build Personal and Professional Capabilities

If we are curious about our companies, our clients or our endeavors, then we will come up with two things: a list of possible questions with no answers, and a list of answers to other questions. In either case, we need to build our personal capabilities. First, because in doing so we might find the answer to those questions that have no answer at the moment. How do we this or that…? Nobody knows? Well, let’s build our capabilities and add more value to our careers, at the time we become more valuable to those around us. 

Second, for those questions that do have an answer, how can we make them better? How can scale the solution or innovation in the approach? The questions that we ask about those answers will determine gaps. And it is precisely in those gaps where we have a great opportunity to build our capabilities. Others might be focused on the known answer, and building expertise in it. But, is that the best answer?... That’s up to us to determine. 

For instance, if we are asking tough questions in our workplace and we find out that nobody really knows how to solve a problem for a client, what do we do? We can leave it to someone else, right? Or, we can build our personal capabilities to solve that problem. 

Observe and Learn

The final idea is observation and learning. Everything around us has a lesson to teach us. The successful project that we implement, the fail experiment that ended up becoming a mess, the mistakes we make, the fantastic and inspiring coworker, or the despotic leader. Everything, all the time, has a lesson to teach us. It is up to us to determine what that lesson is. 

We need to open to observing what is going around us, and learning from our experiences and stories. If we want to add value to our careers we must be open-minded, learn from failure and also be humble in success. Ultimately, observation becomes our capacity to remain in a total awareness mode of what is going around us. Once we observe something interesting, we learn from it. 

In a world where everybody is either distracted, or extremely fixated on a few things, we add value to our careers and become more valuable to others by recognizing gaps and closing them. 

These are three simple habits that can potentially guide us in adding value to our professional careers. Their simplicity and power come from the fact that they depend on us. We don’t need money to ask tougher questions or observe. And to build our personal capacities and learn, there are thousands of free resources out there. Don’t wait for others to come and invest in your professional future. Take this responsibility in your hands.  

Follow me on Twitter: @erubio_p
Visit my blog: www.innovationdev.org

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About the Author: Enrique Rubio is an Electronic Engineer and a Fulbright scholar with an Executive Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Syracuse University. Enrique is passionate about leadership, business and social entrepreneurship, curiosity, creativity and innovation. He is a blogger and podcaster, and also a competitive ultrarunner. Visit the blog: Innovation for Development and Podcast. Click here to follow Enrique on Twitter. 

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