Take steps today to secure your job—and help get ahead, too!
Become an expert
A great way to secure your job is to offer knowledge that no one else can. Make yourself indispensable by becoming an expert in a specific field. Your range of expertise doesn’t need to be broad, but it should be essential. Learning everything about one of your company’s biggest clients, or every facet of a popular product, makes you more valuable to the company. Ideally, you should also try to connect your area of expertise to as many facets of your company as possible.
Help others
Improve your job security by offering to help out your co-workers whenever the opportunity arises. Be sure you’re offering assistance because you are a strong team player and not because you’re expecting a favor in return. This positive attitude is another strong asset that will impress managers who are making tough personnel decisions.
Also, when companies decide who to keep, they often look for flexible people who can easily flip between job functions. Helping others with their workloads demonstrates that kind of flexibility.
When choosing an area to master, focus on business segments that are growing. Look for places where new hiring or promotions are occurring. Those represent the future of the company, and that’s where you want to be.
Master a system
New technology can be the bane of a business. Every new system or piece of equipment costs time in retraining employees to use it. Worse yet, if no one knows how to use it, the capital expense involved in acquiring it is wasted.
Give your value at the workplace a boost by becoming the go-to resource for a technology system that is instrumental to your business.
Develop your soft skills
New people can be trained in nearly any job duty, willingly work for less pay or have more recent knowledge about an industry. However, what they probably lack is integration into company culture. Develop that integration by working on your “people skills.”
This could be as basic as knowing names, or as involved as taking an interpersonal communication course. Become the co-worker everyone wants to work with.
