How to Upgrade Your Skills Without Wasting Time

Do you sometimes feel you are not getting your dream job because of inadequate skills? Employers look for one major item when recruiting new staff — the skills. Perfecting your skills while looking for a job is the surest way to secure a vacancy. If you need to get that job you have been admiring for a long time, the secret lies in advancing your skills. In this article, we are going to look at ways to upgrade your skills without wasting time.

Make a personal growth plan

Every successful story started with a plan. The best strategy on how to upgrade skills starts with establishing a plan. Identify your strength and passion so that you will know the trajectory to take.

I’m sure you’ll need to have some milestones to measure your progress, right? A plan will aid in predicting where you will be after months of following it. Once you have come up with a plan, you have to decide what you need to achieve.

With goals but no plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination. Gaining skills is like an investment, and establishing a plan is equally important.

Work on your social circle

There is a common saying that wherever you are, it’s your friends that make your world. Your social network greatly influences your level of skills. You need to have people who can help you in improving your marketability.

One of the best ideas to grow your skills in your line of work is to associate with people with similar skills and intentions. Since no man is an island, you need other people to realize growth. Networking is a discovery platform and a superb way to give your personal brand more exposure.

When was the last time you examined the quality of your social circle? Do your friends contribute to upgrading your skills? If the answer is no, then you need to find people who can work towards polishing the knowledge you have.

The following are reasons networking can be of great help in skills growth.

• Improved communication in your line of career through improved communication style.
• Acquiring new skills and gradual skill development
• Holding yourself accountable through setting goals
• Understanding the market and how to relate professionally
• Improved mental and physical health. Anyone in a specific career keeps attention to their health. This is one of the achievements gained from associating with people who have stayed in your career for long.

Exercise self-discipline

A lot of growth is determined by our input more than the surrounding factors. Self-discipline is about creating new actions, habits of thought, improving oneself to reach your goals. If you need to improve your skills, you must have self-discipline.

You’ll agree with me that there will be several times when you don’t feel like waking up early or adhering to your reading schedule or taking up a new lesson. Everyone feels satisfied in a comfort zone. Unfortunately, no growth happens in your comfort zone.

If you need to broaden your skillset, you have to go past your feelings and do what has to be done. This is where self-discipline is required. For example, if you have enrolled in a new course that requires 2 hours a day, you have to allocate that time regardless of how tired you are or how squeezed your schedule is.

Learn a new language

Have you been in a place where there has to be an interpreter for communication to be flawless? Many opportunities bypass us due to language barriers. If you need to overcome the challenge of the language barrier, there is no way around. You have to learn the language.

The world is quickly turning into a global market if it hasn’t already. The business environment has drastically shifted. Businesses are now done globally. Learning a foreign language will make it easy to do business. An employer will easily recruit staff that will help them in avoiding language bottlenecks.

Language is the core channel of passing information. When travelling to a different country, the first thing people look for is the language spoken. The former South frican Nelson Mandela once said if you speak to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his mind, but if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Regarding the great man’s ideology, learning a different language is one of the rare favours you can do for yourself. Unlike the past, when learning a foreign language was a hustle; today, technology has made it quite easy. You can get online tutors at Preply to teach you different foreign languages, which you can greatly use at your advantage.

The following are some of the benefits of learning a foreign language as you purpose to broaden your skills.

• It improves your performance in other academic areas
• Helps in improved decision making. According to a study from the University of Chicago, the process of decision making becomes easier with multilingual people.
• Employers love it. Multilingual people can interact with people in multiple communities. This gives you an edge over other job seekers.
• It is advantageous for travelling. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, a renowned Australian philosopher, the limits of your language are the limits of your world. Learning a new language opens up the possibility of touring a different country without the fear of a language barrier.
• It helps in improving self-confidence. Confidence is improved when a new skill is mastered. Learning a foreign language, therefore, helps in enhancing self-confidence. If you are looking for a job, self-confidence is a crucial weapon to have in your arsenal.

Avoid too much social media

Social media has positively changed people’s lives. Many businesses have thrived due to various social media platforms. While there are people using these platforms to their advantage, they can also be a barrier to your progress.

There is no doubt that you will need the internet to advance your skills. However, too much social media will do harm. Like any other tool, you need to know how to use various social media platforms effectively. If you need to stop wasting time on the internet, you need to avoid spending a lot of time on social media.

Skills growth requires time and commitment. The time you spend on social media can be used to acquire new knowledge or refine the skills you already have.

Start a personal project

Success and skills growth is obtained from an inner desire for growth. Desire is the starting point of all achievement. Regardless of your line of career, there should be a project you can start on to sharpen your skills.

For example, if you are a software developer, you can create a prototype of an application. While doing a project, you will have a huge opportunity to learn and gain more knowledge. The internet has made learning opportunities limitless.

Whichever project you choose to tackle, the internet will provide tons of information and guidelines on how to achieve it. Rather than wasting time on unproductive activities, you can use the internet to improve your skills as you seek your dream job.

Personal projects may emanate from personal interests or a challenge. Most of the projects born out of personal interests will most likely succeed since there is a personal satisfaction of success attached to them. When doing personal projects, it is important to set timelines that can aid in gauging your progress.

Recognize when you need a break

It is obvious that your brain needs to relax after absorbing or executing many tasks. Unlike machines that can work for days without failure, the human brain gets exhausted. While we have discussed the importance of taking new courses, starting personal projects and improving on your social circle, you also need to embrace the brain’s limits.

Ignoring mental exhaustion can cause a lot of harm to your health. When seeking new skills, recognize that your brain needs to relax. Productivity decreases with mental exhaustion.

Endnote

Skills growth is important for anyone who needs to have personal and career growth. More importantly, job seekers need to improve their skills through a deliberate search of knowledge constantly. There are many avenues that you can leverage to upgrade your skills and prove relevant to an employer.

If you are looking on how to gain new skills, this article highlights some of the core practices you can employ to achieve that. However, while everyone yearns to have personal development, a lot of input is required from an individual.

The success you endeavor to enjoy will come from establishing and sticking to a plan, networking with people with similar goals to yours, taking personal projects and learning a new language. Actually, learning a second language is useful in nearly all fields. What are you waiting for? Find an online tutor and begin online classes.

Kalibrr is a technology company that aims to transform how candidates find jobs and how companies hire talent. Placing the candidate experience at the center of everything it does, the company continues to attract the best talent from all over, with almost three million professionals and counting. Kalibrr ultimately connects these talents to companies in search of their next generation of leaders.

The only end-to-end recruitment solutions provider in Southeast Asia, Kalibrr is headquartered in Makati, Philippines, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Established in 2012, it has served over 19,000 clients and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful start-up incubators and venture capitalists. These include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Patamar Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

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