by Marwa Aleskafi, Program Director at Brinc Batelco IoT Hub

Many believe that they end up where they are in their careers by accident, or through climbing predefined corporate ladders. In today’s dynamic, merit driven corporate world, nothing can be further from the truth. Advancing your career as a professional or as an entrepreneur is contingent upon achieving tremendous and rapid growth. There are many avenues to achieving that growth that are at times overlooked by talent management professionals. Sometimes you need to look beyond your career development plan to develop your career and to accelerate your growth. This piece will include strategies that every professional and entrepreneur can proactively follow to excel. Here are our top five to help you get started:

Seek Continuous Learning Opportunities

In any career path you find yourself in, whether you are an entrepreneur or an employee, there is no greater way to excel in what you do than to understand where the frontier is in your industry. In the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds, if you are not careful, it can pull you into busywork. Busy work includes all-consuming day to day activities that can leave little room for learning, learning that can help you get through these activities more efficiently.

Be proactive about allocating a portion of your time to looking at innovations in your field of expertise. Set calendar reminders to take that time, set automated news alerts using keywords that notify you when your areas of interest come up in the news. Subscribe to newsletters that you find add tremendous value to your industry. Find inspiring audiobooks and podcasts that you can potentially listen to on your commute to work, during your workouts, or while doing things around the house. Learning more about a topic you are passionate about can bring so much joy and exhilaration that comes with discovery and progress. But far from serving only an emotional purpose, continuous learning is vital to ensuring that your business stays relevant and aligned with market expectations, but above all, your knowledge will create a level of confidence that will provide your clients with significant reassurance of your competence and ability to deliver at the level of their expectation. Learning can also be key to honing your leadership skills, it enables you to maintain an open mind, to become an effective mentor that passes on the practice of engaging in lifelong learning.

Push the Frontier of your Industry

One of the greatest byproducts of learning is finding inspiration. To truly excel in your career as either an entrepreneur or an employee, you need to master the art of crafting a unique value proposition for your core product, and differentiating yourself from the competition.

At times understanding what is out there can help you develop solutions that address gaps or create new markets tackling emerging challenges. It could also allow you to view opportunities from a unique perspective that enables you to innovate in your industry. Whether this includes developing new tools, products, or services, utilizing them in a novel way, or finding alternative engagement models that are more attractive to your audience.

Be the Person you Aspire to be

One of the most overlooked strategies to advancing your career or supporting the growth of the organization you are building or working for is to take the time to craft and perfect your vision. To understand where you would like to be in the medium to long term. This goes beyond understanding an overarching and high-level aspiration for the destination you seek to reach but includes setting fundamental goals. The parameters may differ depending on the industry you are in. They can include the revenue you seek the generate, the geographies you aspire to expand to, or the number/size of the clients you would like to serve. Once you have gained clarity on those goals, list the behaviors, strategies, culture, and values that a company or an individual performing at that level would uphold.

Start upholding those today.

This might be the most counterintuitive growth hack that will transform any career path. Be the person you aspire to be now, let your actions reflect the place you want to reach. This will not only build your confidence, but also impact how you hold yourself and how you are perceived by your clients and colleagues. This will in turn build trust in the value that you offer, which will inevitably help you close more deals, deliver more projects, keep your stakeholders satisfied and boost your brand. Adopting the behaviours that you assign to the person who has achieved your medium to long term goals will also help you acknowledge that what got you here will not get you there. It will inspire you to test new strategies, follow that continuous learning path, stay ahead of the curve and restructure your resources accordingly.

Collaborate and Inspire

Nothing kills organizational or personal growth more than group think. Always strive to be surrounded by a diverse set of individuals that do not think like yourself, ones that challenge you, and ones that bring a new perspective to the table. Collaborate with individuals and companies that share some of your aspirations. There is great strength to be gained from pooling the resources, strategies and expertise of organizations operating in the same industry. Traditionally, competition was viewed negatively in the corporate world, leaving individuals and companies scrambling to obtain a share of that small pie. This approach completely neglects the notion that everyone gains from collaboration–it leads to industry and niche growth creating a much larger pie. Through intra and interorganizational collaboration, dedicate time to periodic brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming sessions can help provide you with a list of ideas and strategies that inspire you to innovate for weeks or months post session, it can also bring to light improvements that you were not aware were needed, and bring in new perspectives on familiar issues. Brainstorming sessions can also foster a culture of teamwork and collaboration within organizations.

Experiment and Make Mistakes

Corporate cultures that embrace experimentation and are tolerant of mistakes experienced tremendous growth in the last few decades, this includes giants like Amazon, Microsoft, booking.com and Fedex. Trial and experimentation can help you uncover innovative strategies and tools that enable you to excel in your career, become more efficient, add more value and produce better outcomes.

Trials come with a risk, but the rewards of a successful experiment can far outweigh the cost of a few failed ones. This is especially true if you learn to recognize the outcomes rapidly, pivot and launch your subsequent experiment. Nothing can be more effective in your mission to push the frontier of your profession than discovering, building, and implementing innovative strategies. Something you will not be able to do if you held on to your fear of failure.