How To Play The Long Game With Your Career In 2022

If you want to play the long game with your career in 2022, you need to understand three key things before you can build your strategy.

Every Job Is Temporary

First of all, every job is temporary. It doesn't matter if you're an hourly worker. It doesn't matter if you have a dream job right now with full benefits. That job is temporary. They could restructure. They could fire you. Or you might realize this opportunity isn't working for you anymore and decide to look for a new job.

Whatever the case, you will not be at your current job forever, and you cannot predict when that day will come. So, you have to build a strategy around this belief so that you can quickly mobilize and find your next opportunity, which leads to my second point.

You Are A Business-Of-One

You are a business-of-one, my friends. Stop thinking like an employee.

I heard a horrible phrase the other day, which is when you work for someone, you're a “wage slave.” Look, I don't want you to think that way. You are a service provider selling your services to a customer (the employer) and you want to build a business partnership where you work together. To do that well, though, you must do your market analysis every six months.

You should be asking yourself, “Who's hiring for my skill set, and what's the market rate?” because you're a commodity and it fluctuates. If you don't pay attention to this, you could end up like a lot of my clients who get pushed out of their jobs after years at a company and realize they're overpaid for the market. They try to get hired and they can't because employers say, “You're overqualified. You're too expensive.” Companies don't want to hire them because they're afraid that the moment they get a better-paying job, they'll leave. It's a very bad position to be in. So, you must always stay relevant.

Let me give you another example. You're selling your services and one day somebody comes in and they're offering the same services for 50% off. What do you do? Lower your rates? Or do you try to create more value so that they want to pay you the higher rates?

This is your career. That's exactly how it works. You are a business-of-one, and you must pay attention to all of this and make sure that you stay relevant so you can get paid what you want and work with who you want, which brings us to my final point.?

Brand Or Be Branded

You must always have a marketing plan. If you're working, you still need to be branding—and it's not slapping together a resume and sending it off to job boards. This is about you having a presence on social media like LinkedIn and a strategy for online networking so that people know what you're about. You need to build your reputation.

Developing a strong personal brand means you’ll have a good resume and an even better disruptive cover letter—a storytelling cover letter that gets employers at “hello” and makes them fall in love with you. It also requires you to know how to do interview prep because you want to be real and authentic, but you also want to stand out in the interview process because when people do this kind of marketing for their business-of-one, they get better opportunities and better companies to want to hire them.

Companies want to hire the best. So, you need to present the best.

As a professional, playing the long game with your career is only possible once you understand that: every job is temporary, you’re a business-of-one, and brand or be branded. It's not rocket science or brain surgery. And now that you understand these three things, it's time to apply this knowledge.?

You need tactics to play the long game with your career, and that's what my company does. If you’re serious about finding long-term career success, sign up for my FREE Resume & LinkedIn Bootcamp to learn how to effectively market your business-of-one to employers.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to play the long game with your career in 2022?