This article was originally published on Demand Generation Academy.
Whether you’ve made a 2021 goal to focus on advancing your career or you’ve started to think about your post-pandemic professional life, now is the perfect time to assess where you want your career to go next. Too often, we get a job early in our career and stick with that narrow focus for all our careers. Marketers are particularly prone to do this because we’re often hired into task-oriented roles, such as graphic design, event coordination, or content writing.
Even if you love your job, adding new skills will enable new career growth within your given field. Fortunately, a salary increase is also more justified when you’ve shown you’ve taken initiative to broaden your skills to include additional marketing areas.
As a manager of a large team, I encourage everyone to learn each other’s jobs. It’s incredible to see how a content writer or graphic designer produces materials that convert better after learning the core elements of demand generation.
There is a reason people call it a career path.
If you are fortunate, these will be presented to you and you’ll know you need to make a decision. Sometimes, we don’t realize the true impact of career decisions - or indecisions - until well after the fact. There’s also a third occurrence that happens less frequently: when you choose to forge a new path without options being presented to you. It may be a parallel path that enables you to use the same skills you’ve already honed but in a new company or different industry. Or, your new path becomes possible from new skills you’ve acquired through additional coursework.
Now is the time to ask yourself where you want your career to go and which path will get you there.