Zeina Bain shares her advice on approaching your career like a business strategy – and the key ingredient is investment.
“I’ve been in the same position for a long time in terms of where I work and a lot of times, you sort of look up and go, ‘Should I be changing job? Is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?’
And a mentor gave me a great piece of advice which was, ‘Where do you want to be in five years’ time? Draw out your goals and work backwards from that.’And if where you are is giving you the exposure, the skill sets to get to that goal in five years’ time, then don’t just move for the sake of it. Think about how you can benefit from where you are and the cachet that you have within your current company to get involved in things beyond your current brief. But always have your eye on five years ahead and think about it as systematically as you would look at a business strategy.
As you build your path towards that goal think about how you portray yourself, your own personal brand – which is a slight cliched phrase, but you do need to invest in yourself. It’s no good just having an internal network, you also need to have an external network. Start building your ‘calling card’ as to what you bring to the table.So in terms of building my personal brand, I spend a lot of time doing speaking engagements, not because I want to blow hot air, but because you come across interesting people.You’ll never know when you make that connection again where someone says, ‘Ah, I heard you in that panel. I thought what you said was interesting.’ And that’s led me on to other connection points.
A successful network builds on itself because people know about you, they’ll introduce you to more people and it’s a very virtuous circle in that regard.”
This is an abridged transcript of the video lesson – watch the video for the full story!
