5 essential qualities for a successful career

5 essential qualities for a successful career 5 essential qualities for a successful career Your career is an integral part of your life because you spend most of your waking days working to earn a living. Just as it is crucial to do what you love in order to enjoy your career, having the necessary skills to perform the work is also critical to achieving success in your career line. The other component that can help enjoy long-lasting success in your job is to have the soft skills needed to work along with others and enhance your productivity. Soft skills are your attributes or characters that enable you to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people in your organization. They include such qualities as good communication, team spirit, curiosity, and ability to exert influence in the organization.Having the right experience and qualifications will help you land the job, possessing the essential soft skills will take you further ahead of your peers and help you have a fulfilling career life. Your experience and qualification tell the employer what you can do, they are your hard skills, and it expresses your intelligence quotient based on the assigned tasks. Your soft skills, on the other hand, is all about attitude and personality, it expresses your emotional intelligence. During job hunt, your I.Q will help get you into the company, but your E.Q will help sustain and help you grow in the company.Here are my top 5 essential qualities needed for a successful career:1. Curious MindHaving a curious mind will help you to learn as much as possible about the organization, and you will be able also to contribute that knowledge for the success of the company. With a curious mind, you will be able to take the initiative without waiting for your boss to tell you what to do, come up with creative solutions to organizational challenges. Creativity enables you to experiment with different ideas without being afraid of making mistakes; it empowers you to question certain assumptions and ways of doing things and propose better ideas that can potentially be come a quicker or less expensive means of executing tasks.2. Excellent Communication skillsYou must be an effective communicator in order to collaborate with others to achieve organizational objectives. Communication, in this case, can be verbal, non-verbal or written type, but you need to know how to pass across your message, rally round your team towards a common goal. Good communication involves explaining, persuading, motivating, and providing plans for executing tasks. For written communication, don’t hit “send” immediately after composing an email. Take time to reread and make edits if necessary to ensure that your message is clear, concise, and it will convey the right intentions.An excellent communicator must also be an active listener. You must be effective at listening to others, knowing what they want so that you can effectively articulate your response to their requests and eliminate noise or communication gaps in your messaging. Having the skills to decode and del iver ideas and information so that the message recipients can easily understand and act is critical as you advance to roles with greater responsibility and visibility in your organization.3.  Influencing SkillsYour ability to influence people and lead change in your organization is very crucial for your success in your line of career. In most organization, you work in teams, and most of the time you may need others to perform certain tasks in order to advance the organizational objectives. Your ability to work with them, influence or persuade them to work on those activities is essential as you deliver results within the organization. You need to have the necessary leadership skills that will help you to make them accept your ideas and bring people together to execute on the idea. It is about being able to sell your vision and plans and get people to believe that what you are telling them is the best and right way to move the organization forward.4.  Courage ConfidenceEverything be gins with confidence, and confidence is essential to driving solutions for your organization. If you have confidence, it will be easier for others to believe and listen to you as you work with other employees in your company. Confidence involves knowing your areas of strength and weaknesses, and it can help to inspire trust and build confidence in your ability to lead. Along with confidence, having the necessary courage to make decisions and follow through on your plans is essential for a successful career. The fear of making the wrong and making a mistake has kept many people from coming forward with their opinions in an organization. Courageous people are different; they understand that mistakes provide a learning opportunity and it helps to develop them to make a better decision next time around. Confidence and Courage are great soft skills to have if you want to be successful in your career.5.  Results-drivenYou are employed in the organization to get things done. There will be no benefits to having all the right peoples’ skills if you are unable to convert it to results that will help achieve the organizational objectives. You must know how to challenge yourself to deliver results, influence others within and outside your organization to execute so that measurable results. To deliver results, you must be a team player, always looking out and contributing to the success of your team. If your team is successful, chances are, that you will also achieve success as an individual.Closing Thoughts:To achieve success in your career, you must be able to develop both the hard and soft skills required to get your job done, be able to collaborate and work effectively with your team, so that everyone is working harmoniously towards achieving organizational objectives.