How to Advance Your Career: 10 Steps to Climb to the Top

Are you trying to advance your career in a competitive professional landscape? You’ll need to master strategic positioning, continuous skill development, and understanding your unique value proposition. Lucky for you, we have an easy-to-understand toolkit just for you.

We’ve compiled the 10 essential steps for progressing your career once you’re past the first wave from the following books: Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout, Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy, The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, and I Wish Someone Had Told Me… by Dana Perino. These perspectives have everything you need to know about crafting your professional identity, navigating career transitions, embracing your competitive side, and more. 

Editor’s note: This article is part of Shortform’s guide to career development. If you like what you read here, there’s plenty more to check out in the guide!

1. Understand Your Current Position

According to Ries and Trout in Positioning, first you need to understand your current professional positioning before trying to advance your career. How do others perceive you in terms of your strengths and weaknesses relative to other candidates or employees?

(Shortform note: According to Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, the key to understanding how people perceive you is learning how to receive feedback effectively. They advise that to stay open to feedback, you should become aware of certain triggers that might prevent you from listening—for example, a relationship trigger might cause you to ignore advice from someone you dislike, or an identity trigger might make you ignore feedback that criticizes who you are as a person. Ironically, the kind of feedback that an identity trigger might block could be especially useful in determining your current position, because it implies a disconnect between how you see your identity (or position) and how someone else sees you.)

2. Identify Your Desired Position

Second, Ries and Trout advise that, as you craft a career progression plan, you must realistically identify your desired professional position. They caution that you can’t be the best at everything to everybody and argue that the biggest challenge in positioning yourself for career success is often figuring out specifically what professional positioning you want.

(Shortform note: While Ries and Trout don’t mention it, we might infer a connection between identifying your desired position and finding an open niche. To identify your desired career positioning, you might also need to identify the niche where you can succeed professionally.)

3. Consider Your Name

It might not be intuitive, but evaluating your name should be part of your career progression plan. Ries and Trout assert that your name is a crucial element of how people perceive you, just as a brand name influences how people perceive products and companies. As with company acronyms, they advise you to avoid going by initials, as they’re less memorable.

Furthermore, they argue that some names intuitively sound more credible than others for a given role. Thus, as with brands, if your name doesn’t support your desired positioning, Ries and Trout recommend changing it or using an assumed name (for example, many authors write under a pen name).

4. Chart Your Course 

To round out your career progression plan, Ries and Trout offer some specific suggestions for charting a course from your current professional positioning to your desired position.

First, they emphasize the importance of fit. Your boss and company should fit with your values and goals—in other words, your desired positioning. Conversely, your desired positioning should fit with your company’s vision and goals. Ries and Trout advise that when applying or interviewing with a new company, you emphasize this fit. To do so, they advise that you focus on how your strengths match the company’s strengths rather than how your strengths can help the company’s weaknesses.

Second, Ries and Trout emphasize the importance of networking and staying in touch with people outside your own organization. They contend that you get most of your big opportunities through these contacts.

Finally, Ries and Trout emphasize the importance of persistence with your career progression plan, since positioning is inherently a long-term proposition.

5. Develop Your Skills

Developing your skills is one of the most important ways to increase your productivity and advance your career. According to Brian Tracy in Eat That Frog!, you must determine what you need to learn in order to do your job better and then learn it.

Developing your skills has multiple benefits:

• It gives you confidence and motivation to plunge into challenging tasks without hesitation and get them done.
• It enables you to avoid procrastination. A major reason for procrastinating is feeling inadequate in a key area. Weakness in one area can be enough to keep you from starting a task.
• Developing your skills is a time saver. The better you are at something, the faster you are at getting it done. One additional skill or piece of information can make a big difference in how well you can do something
• It will advance your career. To keep your job and to advance, you need to continually develop your skills in your key result areas. You can always expand your knowledge, and no matter how much you know today, your skills and knowledge are in the process of becoming obsolete.

Identify your most important tasks and capabilities, then draw up a plan to continually develop your skills in these areas. You can learn anything—from typing and computer proficiency to specialized knowledge in your field. Learning should be a priority. Basketball coach Pat Riley said, “Anytime you stop striving to get better, you’re bound to get worse.”

You can take courses and workshops, or earn certifications and advanced degrees in your field. But there are also several ways to make learning part of your routine:

1) Read about your field or industry daily. Also, read books and articles about personal development and productivity.

2) Take courses and seminars addressing skills you need. Attend conferences and business meetings of your profession or occupation. 

3) Listen to audio programs in your car. The average driver spends 500 to 1,000 hours a year on the road. Use this time to learn.

You build mental muscle or brain power by using your brain—so the more you learn, the more you expand your capacity to learn. The only limits to how far you can go are the limits of your imagination.

6. Identify Constraints

In every effort, there’s always a major constraint or limitation that hinders your progress on completing your task or achieving your goal. Tracy says it can be internal or external. It can even be personal—everyone has limiting factors. There are always multiple factors creating friction, but one is greater than the others.

It’s critical to identify constraints that are holding you, your project, or the company back. Removing it will make a bigger difference in how quickly you achieve your goal than almost anything else you do.

Potential bottlenecks can be:

1) External: Outside factors affecting your ability to accomplish your goal include competitors, the market, customers, and the government. For instance, customers may have a false perception of your product that’s hindering sales. An external factor will turn out to be your biggest constraint only about 20% of the time.

2) Internal: 80% of the time, your biggest constraint will be internal. It may be a person whose help you need or who has to sign off on an aspect of the process. It could be a key resource that’s lacking or an organizational weakness, such as an inadequate marketing or sales effort. Other potential internal limitations are cash flow and operational problems.

3) Personal: Everyone has limitations affecting the pursuit of their tasks and goals, but one factor will predominate. To succeed, you need to honestly examine yourself by asking what personal quality or knowledge or performance gap is holding you back; what keeps you from accomplishing important tasks?

Your primary constraint may not be obvious at first glance. Make a list of every step in the process and every activity, then analyze them to determine what’s holding you back.

It’s important to accurately identify constraints, so that you choose the right strategy to eliminate it and restore progress toward your goal. Focusing on a lesser factor instead of the one that’s hindering you the most will be a waste of time and a diversion.

For instance, one company attributed lagging sales to its sales staff and management, and the company restructured the whole department in response. But this tactic failed to improve sales because the major constraint holding back sales was incorrect pricing, not the sales staff. Once they focused on the right thing, sales took off again.

Once you fix the biggest constraint, you may find another that’s now the biggest. Identify and remove each as you find it. Removing the most consequential bottlenecks will motivate and energize you to push your task to completion. 

Removing a limiting factor may be your most important task at the moment.

7. Embrace Your Competitive Side

In a global work economy, you’re competing with many people with similar capabilities. Success relies on making yourself seem more valuable and desirable than others. According to Hoffman and Casnocha in The Startup of You, knowing how to be more competitive means building a foundation of valuable assets, a guiding set of personal values and ambitions, and an understanding of your market’s needs.

Identify and Strengthen Your Assets

Like the founders of successful startups, you must identify and strengthen your unique assets to gain an edge over competitors. Your assets are the resources you have, whether they be your skills, knowledge, and connections (what the authors refer to as “soft assets”) or your money and possessions (“hard assets”). 

Hoffman and Casnocha note that it’s easier to identify your hard assets since they’re physical or quantifiable, while soft assets might be more difficult to recognize. To identify your soft assets, reflect on things that you consider easy but other people find challenging. For example, your research skills might be a soft asset—when investigating an obscure problem as part of a project, you might find that your colleagues struggle to search for solutions and that you’re able to locate helpful leads easily.

Hoffman and Casnocha recommend you focus on building skills and knowledge over earning money. They note that, while you need money to support your lifestyle and take career risks, skills and knowledge are far more valuable because they allow you to capitalize on new and more lucrative opportunities. When developing your soft assets, prioritize building specialized skills first—those that fit a specific niche and preferably have less competition. When you know one aspect of your field well, you can stand out and build a professional network more easily.

If you feel vulnerable and anxious as you navigate the challenges of your career, Perino says you should recognize your inner tenacity and resilience. You don’t need external safety measures, such as a fail-proof financial cushion, because you are your own source of security. Your education, relationships, skills, and past successes are a strong foundation that can catch you if you fall. When you trust yourself to overcome adversity, handle obstacles, and recover from difficulties, you feel less anxiety and have greater self-confidence. 

To build this self-trust, take an inventory of your resources and accomplishments. Reflect on your past achievements and support systems, reminding yourself of the skills and relationships that have helped you succeed.

Define Your Values and Ambitions

Another important part of creating your competitive edge is defining your unique personal values and ambitions. These help guide you throughout your career and differentiate your work from your competitors’. Hoffman and Casnocha explain that when you figure out what matters to you, whether it’s becoming influential, making others happy, or a more specific cause like promoting sustainable living, you’ll be internally motivated to pursue your career goals. When you’re internally motivated, you work harder and create higher quality work.

To define your values, the authors recommend you periodically reflect on your values and ambitions to see if they’ve changed or consider talking about them with people who know you well. They argue that your aspirations will change and evolve as you progress through life, so you should accept occasional uncertainty and be comfortable with experimentation.

Cater to Your Market’s Needs

While it’s important to be passionate about your work, Hoffman and Casnocha argue that the best entrepreneurs are both realistic and visionary. To turn your assets and passions into a successful career, you must create work that appeals to your market—the people who will buy what you’re offering. Whether you’re a leadership coach or a game designer, you have an audience you’re catering to. Hoffman and Casnocha stress that success in the real world is determined by how other people value our work—whether they find your coaching relevant or your games entertaining.

In other words, you can enhance your competitive edge by keeping the market’s needs in mind. The authors advise you to research what people value to identify fast-growing industries or a popular market that relates to your skills and values. Then, try to locate a niche with little competition so that your skills can stand out. For example, as a game designer, you might notice a growing interest in health and wellness and consider creating games about self-care. 

8. Set Yourself Up for Promotion

To give yourself the best chance for a promotion, Dana Perino argues in I Wish Someone Had Told Me…, you should make it easier for managers to envision you in a higher position. Do this by demonstrating initiative, readiness, and commitment. She recommends a strategy based on three key moves:

• Find opportunities to do the job you’re aiming for while excelling in your current role. Step in to help when colleagues in higher-level positions are absent and offer to take on additional responsibilities. This shows you’re ready to move up the chain of command. 
• Communicate your career goals to your manager. This ensures that your manager understands your ambitions and can provide relevant feedback.
• Focus on skill development rather than obsessing over promotion timelines. Build your skills daily and don’t compare your growth with your colleagues’. Instead of spending energy making comparisons, spend it working on yourself.

9. Never Leave on Bad Terms

What if your career growth takes you to a new organization? Perino says you should focus on maintaining positive relationships when you leave a job, demonstrating professionalism and gratitude. Human Resources expert Michelle Chase adds that how you handle your departure makes a lasting impression. Gracefully departing will help you build a positive reputation and ensure you have former supervisors and colleagues who can vouch for you in the future.

To ensure that your final interactions reflect your best self and work ethic, Chase and Perino recommend you do the following:

1. Prepare before breaking the news to your boss. This will likely be a difficult conversation, so plan what you’ll say in advance, including your specific reasons for leaving. In addition, decide beforehand whether you’d stay at your job with better terms of employment, or if you’re committed to moving on. That way, you’ll be able to respond effectively if you receive a counteroffer.

2. Be mindful of the team you’re leaving behind. Making thoughtful choices will leave a lasting impression of your professionalism. This includes giving a minimum of two weeks’ notice when resigning if you’re an early-career professional. If you’re in a senior or leadership role, be flexible about the timing of your departure to ensure a smooth transition. Additionally, take the time to tell your team and supervisors you value them, and avoid talking negatively about the organization and the team on your way out. If there’s an issue you think is worth raising, share your feedback in a respectful manner.

10. Accept That There’s No Recipe for Work-Life Balance

Throughout your career, it can be challenging to balance your professional and personal lives. According to Perino, work-life balance is highly personal and evolves over time. What feels balanced to one person may be overwhelming or insufficient to another. Moreover, everyone struggles with managing competing demands on their time, regardless of their situation. Perino acknowledges that she doesn’t consider herself to have a healthy work-life balance and argues that society’s obsession with balance creates unnecessary anxiety.

Though Perino says a recipe for work-life balance doesn’t exist, you can prevent burnout by making intentional choices and setting boundaries. However, remain flexible enough to handle the natural fluctuations of professional and personal demands. Perino suggests prioritizing what matters most to you and adopting practical habits that support your priorities:

• Prioritize your well-being. You can’t postpone or delegate your health, so be sure to maintain healthy habits. For example, set aside personal time on your calendar and prepay for the gym and your hobbies so you’re more likely to attend.
• Set boundaries to protect your work and personal lives. Set limits on after-hours work communication. Accept only one weeknight social commitment. Focus deeply when at work, and be fully present with your family when at home.
• Consciously choose what to spend time on. Evaluate requests on your time based on whether the activity is enjoyable, profitable, or supports a cause you care about. This ensures you’re spending time on what truly matters to you.

Additionally, political strategist Jessica Tarlov suggests putting things in perspective by using a five-year filter when you’re stressed or worried. Ask yourself whether the issue that worries you will still matter five years from now, and if not, consciously choose to release that concern.

Learn More About Taking Your Career to the Next Level 

To understand more about advancing your career in a broader context, check out these Shortform guides to the books we’ve referenced in this article:

• I Wish Someone Had Told Me… by Dana Perino
• The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
• Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
• Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy
• The Four by Scott Galloway
• Impact Players by Liz Wiseman