What Does it Take to Be Successful? Focus on This ONE Thing
One of the reasons we do the State of Work and Career Success survey is to quantify how successful U.S. workers feel — and, over time, see how that is changing.
In this study, we define career success as an individual’s self-reported satisfaction with their career progress. The most successful tier represents a roughly 90% likelihood of satisfaction, the second highest tier reflects a 67% chance of satisfaction, followed by 50%, 25% and 10%.
And when we looked at our responses, we found the vast majority of people fall into the bottom three tiers. Only about one fourth (29%) of U.S. workers consider themselves to be moderately successful or highly successful.
So, what are the people who feel successful doing differently?
What are the Success Factors?
As part of the 2022 State of Work and Career Success survey, we developed an index to get the pulse of individuals in the workforce so that we can track their work and career success potential over time. It is composed of 20 measures.
And what we found is that there are six key factors contributing to one’s career potential:
Planning - actively focusing on the future by establishing a career plan, building a network, regularly engaging with a mentor, and having a career sponsor
Culture - having a positive work environment that includes being treated fairly and having work-life balance
Skills - developing technical, soft and leadership skills, and keeping them up-to-date
Experience - having a breadth of experiences including a variety of assignments and roles, cross-industry experience, and leadership experience
Education - getting and using formal education
Staying current - actively following developments in the field, learning new things in the field and participating in industry events
Overall, those surveyed perform best on gaining the right skills and worst on planning their career path... and I think that lack of focus on planning is why so many of us don’t feel successful.
What Are Highly Successful People Doing Differently?
So, what does it take to create progress towards success? Many currently focus on skills development and staying current, but we found that planning makes the biggest difference.
In fact, planning carries twice the weight as any of these other factors when it comes to explaining a worker’s satisfaction with their career progress — 38%, compared to 17% for culture and 14% for skills.
More simply put, the key to success for highly successful workers is having a career plan and the relevant people to help them achieve their goals. In contrast, unsuccessful workers do not place importance on having that strategic roadmap for themselves. They are putting their attention on getting a variety of job assignments and roles.
And I think this makes sense, both the impact of having a clear guide and the absence of it. Planning is hard! How to plan a career feels nebulous for many people and finding a mentor is difficult if you aren’t lucky enough to have a formal mentorship program in your organization or community.
But this is also a silver lining — because if you don’t currently feel successful, you now know the one thing you can focus on that will make the biggest difference. If you’d like a blueprint to help you start, check out “Building the Business of You.” This is exactly why I wrote the book and you can read the first chapter for free.
