Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. In this video, I'm going to share some practical tips, which if you implement on a day-to-day basis, or make it as a part of your behavior, it will help you achieve a lot more in your career. So tip number one is learn to document your achievements over a period of time, maintain some tracker, maybe a notepad, where you write down what have you achieved, let's say, what have you achieved last week, what have you achieved last month, it will not just help you document things for your resume or for your appraisal. It will also help you reflect on why did you achieve certain things. If you ask the question why you will understand that you achieved a certain thing because you had a specific skill or because you had a very good rapport or relationship with some person, which in turn is a signal to you to capitalize on specific areas where you can grow. So documenting your achievements and documenting your skills and strengths is a very important thing. If you want to grow in your career, it also means that you are not just doing things randomly, you are keeping a track of it. By the way, you can also do the same for your failures. Number two, please understand your company's business model. As soon as you get into a new job, understand what is the company's business model or what is the client's business model. When I say business model, understand how this company makes money, how this company makes profit. For example, what is the product or the service or the solution which they are selling in the market, your role may be of a business analyst, your role may be a project manager, your role may be team lead, your role may be software engineer, but you need to understand the business model. And you can get all of this information on the company's website, they generally publish what business they do in what geographies do they operate, all of that stuff is available on the company's website. So as soon as you get into a new job, please understand the company's business model. And then when you start to do your role, okay, which is business analysis, project management, software engineering, anything, try to understand how your role or how your project ties up to company's business, how is your work, how is your project contributing to company's business, for example, revenue growth, for example, increase in profit, etc, etc. So try to understand that if you understand these things, you will be able to have a lot more meaningful conversations with the stakeholders within the company. And best part is that you will appreciate your own work a lot. Because you will see meaning you will see value of what you do on a day to day basis. Now let's go to point number three, never ignore industry trends. When I started in the industry some 20 years ago, mainframe and skills related to mainframe were a lot in the trend. People working in different industries were learning mainframe, COBOL and stuff like that. And they were moving into it. That was the trend at that time, few years down the line, Java became a trend, web development became a trend. And then in parallel, there were also trends around ERP. Okay, there were trends around SAP, Oracle, and all of that. So the point I'm trying to make is understand the technology and the business trend at different times, there are different trends going on in the industry. In today's world, the trend is AI, ML, the trend is cloud computing and a lot more. So you have to be aware of what is the current trend and what is the possible future trend. Now, how will you know that you will know that if you are reading a lot of research paper, if you're reading content from websites like let's say Gartner, McKinsey, Bain and company and a lot more constantly being aware of the trends will help you stay ahead of the curve. Now, let's move on to point number four, develop a T shaped skill set. What does a T shaped skill set mean? T shaped skill is having a wide range of skills, which means knowing a lot of stuff, but at the same time having in depth understanding of one or two skills. So for example, as a project manager, you should be aware of a lot of things happening in the business on the technology side, on the process side, but you should also have in depth expertise in one or two areas. Okay, so having T shaped skills helps a lot. Point number five, learn to manage upwards. Okay, you also need to learn how to manage your boss or how to manage your boss's boss in terms of expectations in terms of what they actually need understanding their communication style. If you understand these things well, then you will be able to tap into the right opportunities at the right time and your work will not get unrecognized. Last but not the least, please don't ignore personal branding. Whatever you do at your work day by day creates a brand of you. When I say brand, it creates an image or a perception in the mind of other people about you. So every success or every failure adds to that particular perception. Okay, so you have a brand, believe it or not, you may have a neutral brand, you may have a bad brand, or you may have a great brand. Everyone has a brand. Okay, it is all that you build over a period of time by the actions that you take, how you present yourself, how you talk, how you write emails, how you respond to certain queries. All of these are small things, but actually help in building the right brand. This also has to do in terms of how you present yourself, how you dress and things like that. So I strongly believe that all of these things, if you take into account, helps you build a better career over a period of time. That's the message in this video. Please let me know your thoughts and ideas and comments. As always, I'll be happy to read and respond to them. Share this video in your network if you think somebody else can benefit from this. Alright, I'll see you in another video very soon. Take care and bye for now.