7 Ways to Update Your Career This Spring

As someone who’s driven to succeed, you know how crucial it is to avoid getting too comfortable and to always strive for improvement. But let’s face it, with the busy pace of everyday life, it’s not easy to consistently prioritize opportunities for career advancement.

With the arrival of spring, it’s an opportune moment to reassess your professional development goals. The longer days and milder weather often bring a surge of energy and potentially more free time. Allocate some of this newfound vigor to rethinking your approach to professional growth, setting the stage for a summer of enhanced success and development.

Unsure of how to begin? Here are seven methods to consider.

1. Reevaluate Your Goals

Have you been working toward the same goals for what feels like quite a while now? It might be time to revisit and refresh your career ambitions. Perhaps you’ve achieved several of these goals, or maybe they no longer align with your vision.

Remember, goals are flexible, not fixed. It’s crucial to periodically evaluate them and consider how modifications could better serve your interests. As you adjust your goals, think about segmenting them into smaller, attainable targets for the upcoming months and chart out the actions required to accomplish each milestone.

2. Update Your Resume and Online Profiles

In the same way that regularly reassessing your goals can slip your mind, it’s also common to overlook the need to periodically spruce up your resume and online profiles. If it’s been a while since you last made updates, consider giving your digital presence a spring refresh. This includes polishing your professional profiles on platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, or other relevant sites. As you do this, take the opportunity to bring your resume up to date as well.

Incorporating this task into your routine every quarter can help ensure that your online presence and resume consistently showcase the most pertinent information to prospective employers or clients.

3. Invest in Professional Development

Have you been meaning to polish certain professional skills but haven’t found the time? Dedicate a moment to pinpoint new skills or knowledge you wish to gain and enroll in appropriate courses, workshops, or webinars. Continuous learning not only maintains your edge in your profession and keeps you informed about your industry, but it also opens doors to meaningful networking opportunities.

4. Spring Clean Your Workspace

A cluttered office can be a major distraction! As you tackle spring cleaning at home, don’t overlook your workspace.

Think about reconfiguring your office to boost both efficiency and enjoyment. Could you let in more natural light to fend off the afternoon fatigue? Perhaps setting up a water station within reach will ensure you stay hydrated all day. It might even be time to consider swapping your traditional desk for a standing one.

Additionally, a clean digital workspace can significantly enhance your focus and productivity. Back up crucial files to an external drive and clear out unnecessary items from your desktop. Tidy up your email by deleting outdated messages and organizing your inbox.

5. Review Your Time Management

Take some time to look at how you spend your workday, and then identify anything that’s a clear time-waster — so you can remove it. Whether you delegate tasks to someone else on your team, or just decide certain tasks don’t need to be completed at all, spring clean your schedule for greater productivity.

This is also an opportune time to reflect on your overall time management. Are there fresh tactics you could adopt to refine your schedule, like time-blocking or the Pomodoro Technique? Implementing new strategies could significantly improve how you navigate your workday.

6. Seek Feedback

Should you find yourself uncertain about potential areas for professional enhancement, consider soliciting input from coworkers, supervisors, or clients. They might offer crucial perspectives and assessments of your work that haven’t crossed your mind. This constructive feedback can serve as a solid foundation for identifying improvement opportunities, setting new objectives, and striving for heightened professional development.

7. Work with an Executive Coach

Lastly, consider investing in executive coaching. An executive coach partners with professionals, particularly those in leadership roles, to pinpoint and refine their career development objectives and the steps required to fulfill them. These coaches specialize in enhancing a range of leadership abilities, including effective communication, strategic decision-making, and adept team leadership. Moreover, executive coaches provide a layer of accountability, conducting regular meetings to track your progress, assist in navigating any obstacles, and make necessary adjustments to your strategies or objectives.

Opting for executive coaching this spring could be the catalyst you need to propel your career forward into its next chapter.

The Bottom Line

Spring is the perfect time to reevaluate your career goals and make some changes to further your professional growth. If you’re unsure of where to start, the seven above suggestions may help you decide, whether you end up just doing a little spring cleaning in your office, or you decide to opt for a full-scale revision of your career objectives.

An executive coach can further help you focus on career development this season, and getting started is easy. Sign up for a complimentary, no-strings-attached, introductory call with an Arootah executive coach today.