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4 Ways to Advance Your Career by Embracing Your CIO’s Strategy

 

As an IT professional, advancement along your career path is important. One way to move forward is by helping the CIO attain their strategic goals for the company. Understanding the CIO’s overall mission and the role of technology to increase company performance demonstrates your own strategic thinking abilities. You can talk about your experiences in future interviews to set yourself apart from other candidates and potentially land a new job.

Helping the CIO reach any of the following four priorities this year can aid in your career progression.


1. Data Analysis

Use your data literacy to address business needs and outcomes. This helps you transform the company to better carry out its mission. Understanding the analysis process, analytical tools, and how to work with data lets you collaborate with non-technical users and fill business needs through data and technology. This helps the organization become more inclusive, an issue that all stakeholders should be focused on.

2. Movement of Data to the Cloud

Most companies are moving their data to the cloud, adopting a software as a service (SaaS) solution, and increasing their cybersecurity. You can use your documentation, task delegation, and knowledge-sharing skills to facilitate and support these updates. Promotion of growth makes you a positive change agent in the organization.

3. Expansion of Self-Service Technologies

Many companies are looking for scalable, secure, and effective self-service solutions. This is because the pandemic continues to impact the way basic services are delivered to consumers. Demonstration of your knowledge and skills involving self-service technologies makes you an important team player. You can create practical roadmaps for adoption, transparency, and related issues.

4. Navigation of a Cultural Shift

Company culture is difficult to feel and maintain during times of significant change. This includes shifting from in-person work to remote or hybrid work and back again. Because working in silos is ineffective, you can break down the barriers by becoming a culture contributor. You can make it a goal to collaborate on projects to drive successful outcomes. This may include welcoming, training, and mentoring new team members, sharing knowledge and ideas, or boosting morale. Doing your part to contribute to a positive work environment and culture can lead to new opportunities within the organization.

Advance Your Career

Find a job with more responsibility with help from RightStone. Visit our job board today.


Successful Professionals: How to Improve Your Organizational Skills

 

Whether you work onsite or remotely, your organizational skills are important. Your ability to focus on tasks, remain productive, and meet deadlines plays a role in your career progression. As a result, you need to complete as much work as possible to the best of your ability each day.

Use these tips to improve your organizational skills at work.


Create a Routine

Establish habits that give structure to your day. This helps things go more smoothly so you can accomplish more. The longer you spend streamlining your habits, the more efficiently you can reach your goals.

Schedule Time for Email

Determine the times of day to check your email. This prevents you from reading new messages as they enter your inbox. When the time comes, respond to your priority email first. Star any messages you need to get to later. Organize your read email into folders. This helps you stay focused on your tasks while minimizing disruptions.

Time Block Your Days

Plan blocks of time to finish specific tasks. Include your most though-intensive activities during the times you are most productive. This helps you maintain focus and minimize disruptions. Be sure to allow for flexibility when things that need your attention come up. Remember to adjust your schedule accordingly.

Complete One Task at a Time

Focus on finishing one activity at a time. This helps prevent mistakes, lowers stress, and helps meet deadlines. You should get more done in less time with fewer distractions. You also can use your momentum to start the next activity on your list.

Take Regular Breaks

Walk away from your desk at regular intervals. Take a quick walk, talk with a coworker on break, or listen to music. Or, read a book, meditate, or listen to a podcast. You should come back focused and ready to accomplish more.

Establish Checklists

Develop checklists for recurring tasks and projects to standardize your work processes. Streamlining the steps ensures you fulfill all of the requirements. This reduces the number of errors and time spent redoing tasks.

Develop a Filing System

Establish a digital or physical system to file documents. You may want folders for invoices, contracts, or other important papers. Or, you could set up email folders by project, sender, or other categories. This ensures you save important correspondence without keeping unnecessary messages or documents.

Clean Up Your Workspace

Put away everything you do not need at the end of each day. Having a clean workspace when you start work the next day helps you stay motivated, focused, and productive. It also lets you find the documents you need when you need them.

Looking for a New IT Position?

Stay organized during your next IT job search by working with a recruiter from RightStone. Here is a link to our job board.


8 Traits that Successful Professionals Show

Every job varies in terms of the skills, abilities, and talents that are required for success. A technical skill that’s absolutely crucial to one role might be completely superfluous to a professional working at a separate job. That said, there are some traits that every highly successful professional possesses, irrespective of their particular role or of the industry that they work in.

By understanding the qualities that are conducive to success in any role, we’ll be much more likely to cultivate those traits within ourselves and thereby make it more likely that we’ll enjoy success in our own careers.

With that in mind, here are eight common traits of highly successful professionals:

1. Discipline.

Before success becomes possible, an individual must learn how to forego impulsive pleasure, concentrate for long periods of time, and never veer from their own standards of excellence. All of this must start with self-discipline.

2. Passion.

Professionals who care deeply about their work and who believe that their goals are worthwhile are much more likely to be successful than those whose commitment to the task is merely lukewarm.

3. Eagerness to learn.

Success requires an ability to consistently update one’s store of knowledge and to adopt alternative points of view.

4. Ability to take risks.

If you’re not willing to take risks, you will remain in the same place.

5. Organization.

As success accumulates, so too does responsibility. Staying on top of a growing number of daily tasks requires an ability to keep things in order over long periods of time.

6. They seek opportunities to learn from the success of others.

No one climbs the ladder of success on their own. There are countless relationships that have to be cultivated and maintained along the way. For every successful professional out there, there are mentors, teachers, and inspirational figures behind the scenes who each played some sort of role in that person’s achievements. The ability to engage with and learn from successful individuals who came before you is crucial to our own thriving.

7. Communication.

If you’re able to communicate in a forthright, confident, and articulate manner, you’re much more likely to clearly express – to yourself and to others – what success actually looks like for you, and what you need to achieve it.

8. They prioritize their health.

Physical and mental health is the foundation for any success story. When we fail to nourish our bodies and our minds, we’re setting ourselves up to encounter serious impediments to success. In order to be successful in our careers, we first have to ensure that we’re getting the diet, rest, exercise, and self-care that we need to be able to perform at our best.

Improvement is an ongoing process, and the actions that we take today determine the degree of success that we’ll enjoy tomorrow. At RightStone, we specialize in providing professionals with the resources that they need to advance in their careers. Contact us today to get started!