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Now is a great time to figure out a career development strategy that will make you shine. With so many people looking for work these days, it could be easy for your resume to get lost in a towering stack of papers from other potential employees. If you work at a big corporation, it could be easy for you to get lost in the shuffle without getting the recognition you deserve. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. By taking a few simple steps, you can get your career development back on track.

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, career strategist Bill Barnett recommends that employees think strongly about “why an employer should hire you or promote you over someone else” in order to move up the corporate ladder more quickly in your existing job or to find another job. If you “emphasize what makes you distinctive and how that leads to your success at work,” Barnett believes that you are much more likely to be valued for your unique skills, which means that you are more likely to get the job you want.

In his article, Barnett outlines five easy steps to take to improve your career development.

1. Determine what your strengths are as an employee – both your more conventional strengths as well as things that make you unique.

2. Survey your colleagues and managers to get input about what they think your strengths are.

3. Review performance review materials and such from prior years to get a sense of ways in which you have grown as an employee and ways that you have stayed the same.

4. Assess how well you are suited for your current position and what skills and strengths you are currently taking advantage of.

5. Reflect on your specific strengths and weaknesses, and use the knowledge you gain to your career development advantage.

An even easier way to go through these steps is to invest in online personality tests. It is a good idea to take an a personality test periodically, which will give you specific information about your strengths and weaknesses at work, as well as you insight into such things as your communication style and how you deal with conflicts.

If you take such online personality tests more than once, the test results can also show you how you have grown and changed over time, which could give you important insights into how to market yourself as you work on improving your career development.

 

Career Development Through Testing

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