Get Better On Your Own Time and Dime

Someone should tell you this and it might as well be me: You haven’t “arrived.” You probably won’t ever arrive. Neither will I. At least I hope I don’t. I always want to be improving and honing my craft.

And just because you land some fancy title doesn’t mean you’re set for life or done learning or growing.

Graduation is simply the first step in a journey that’s called your professional career. Now it’s time for you to use that base knowledge and those experiences to build your career.

It means constant improvement. And if you want to make more, do more, then that means you hone your skills on nights and weekends (yes, on your own dime!).

Let me be clear: Getting better at night and weekends is an investment in yourself.

My best illustration of this is our iThemes COO Matt Danner.

When he started working for us I put him on what we needed most: sales emails … the most entry level position we had at the time. It’s perhaps the toughest yet “boring” job we have as he would be answering emails that come through our contact form with questions from our prospects and customers.

He came to us with no true web skills to speak of. He was super green, but willing to work hard and to learn. We saw potential in him. So after a couple of weeks on the job, I put out this challenge to him: “Look throughout our company and see what job or jobs interest you … and go for it.”

A couple more weeks passed and he came to me and said, “I want to be a front-end developer.” So again, another challenge went his way: “OK, so now you know what you want … the trick is getting there, but it takes commitment and hard work. To get where you want, you have to start learning all you can about that job on your own time and dime.” (Maybe I’m paraphrasing a bit.)

Roughly four or five months later, he had done the work on nights and weekends and felt confident in his progress. He had spent his own time on after-hours projects to learn and then hone his skills. He had faithfully sought advice and help from others in our company, when one day he came to me and said boldly that he thought he had now surpassed my own skills as a web developer.

I knew he had. It was a good day for Matt AND for our company.

But of course he didn’t stop there, right? You keep going and learning more and more, which ultimately put him in the amazing position of being named the Chief Operating Officer of our company at 24-years-old.

The caveat to this story is … yes, you need downtime and rest and make sure you get enough of that … but consider using a large portion of your free time investing in yourself and where you want to be and go.

So far I’ve just talked about the time element of investing in yourself and your skills … but it can also mean your DIME too (i.e. making personal financial investments in it too). Too many people simply rely on their company to invest in them.

You should NEVER solely rely on your boss or organization to invest in your skills. Invest first in yourself. Make the time. Write the check. Because ultimately at the end of the day, whether you stay at that organization or not … you take those skills with you. 

So invest in books (specifically get a Kindle and build your ebook library to take everywhere), register for conferences, training, or classes to get more skills and take personal time if needed, get into online training membership and attend webinars and watch videos in your niche …. whatever helps you learn and grow.

Trust me … as a boss, this type of team member rises to the top. They are the clear leaders you take for the future of your organization. Matt is living proof.

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This is part of the 5-minute Career Nugget series at Purposeful Paychecks. Share your best career advice here!