How to improve yourself AND your career prospects

It’s important to separate your business life and your personal life. After all, if you let the two become too intertwined then you’ll always find yourself neglecting one too much. Chances are it will be your personal life, in which case you’ll start to feel like a non-stop robot that’s always on the job! 

That doesn’t mean that you can only focus on one of them, of course. In fact, you can do things in your own time that help you nurture both. It’s completely possible to improve your personal life while strengthening your job prospects at the same time.

Want to know how? Here are a few suggestions.

 Get formally educated 

Colleges feature so many courses that it can be hard to tell which of them are actually useful. A lot of people only see further education as a means to an end. They’ll look for the courses that they’ve been told will be useful in the future and join up based on that information. This means that people often take on courses that they don’t enjoy very much.

It’s important to join courses that are going to help you in numerous ways. Let’s take, as an example, the business admin and management courses you can take at places like Cal University. They can help your career prospects for obvious reasons. But they also help foster critical thinking that can be applied in your personal life, too. I also offer self-paced online courses (for free), for more info, check out the Wanderlust and Company shop. 

Expand your range of hobbies 

People want to work with interesting people. The ones who really stand out stand out when an employer reviews resumes aren’t just the ones with impressive degrees. It’s rarely enough to have such a thing these days. Resumes often include a small section about your personal interests. Why not have something interesting to write about?

When you enrich your personal life with a range of hobbies, you help your career prospects. What you do in your spare time informs how you do pretty much everything else. Employers know this. They want to hire unique people, not the aforementioned robots. If they see you love to socialize, then they’ll know you should be good in a team. If you like playing chess, they’ll know you’re a strategist. You never know when these sorts of talents will come in useful at a particular job!

Increase the amount of software experience you have

Software is vital in pretty much every business. But every business seems to have their own way of doing things in this area. Microsoft Office used to be a standard across the country. If you knew how to use Word and Excel, you could generally get along fine. But Microsoft Office is no longer the hot commodity it once was.

Companies are now invested in much more specific software. This also means that they’re using a wider range of software in order to cover all those specific bases. A lot of the software a company uses have free alternatives if they’re not already open-source. So try using these platforms in your personal life to gain experience with such software. Example: many project-oriented companies are using things like Trello for project management. You can get your own Trello account and use it to better organize your personal life!

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