The internet is full of articles and videos to explore the next steps in your career path. Here are five easy steps to give a simple overview of how to take the next step in your career. First, you need to figure out what you want to do and what you're best at doing. Like I said in lesson three, some people know, from when they were kids, what they want to do. If you're like me, and didn't grow up knowing, or want to refine your path more, take some time to really think this through. If you haven't already done it, you might want to take another course in this specialization. It's called Achieving Optimal Performance. That course introduces you to the optimal performance model and then helps you apply it to your unique professional profile. You will then be given an opportunity to test out that model. Finally, you'll articulate how to use the model for your personal career success. All of these activities will help you figure out what you want to do and what you're best at doing. If you've already done this, let's move on. Second, establish your baseline, you spent time in lessons two and three in this course doing this. If you need to, go back to those lessons and take a look at your existing network as well as where you are in relation to your next career steps. Understanding where you are, will help you better chart out how to get to where you want to be. The fourth step is going to be engaging your network. But before we get there, step three. Step three is crucial to making sure that you're ready when you do step four. So, before you go out and share with others what you want to do and ask them for help in achieving your goals, you need to get everything ready. By doing this, you'll tell the best story about your goals and aspirations. And the more prepared and targeted you are in reaching out, the better you will leverage your contacts and your contact's contacts. We're going to go into more depth about this later in the lesson but, briefly, you'll need to, at the bare minimum, update and edit your resume to reflect your new goals. Review and organize your social media, it's your face to the world. So you have to update your LinkedIn profile, expand your contacts, and make sure that you've listed your goals and your skills. You also need to work on your elevator speech, in both written and spoken formats. Step four is telling others and engaging them so that they can help you take the next step. As we've mentioned earlier, in lesson one, you're nearly three times as likely to find a job through a personal contact. What that means is that, to realize your goals and to turn them into real opportunities, that will probably happen primarily through using your networks. This is where you'll tie everything together, everything we've discussed in lessons one, two, and three. This is why you looked at your personal and professional contacts and mapped out ways they could help you in being successful, as you continue along your career path. You did that introspective work to look at how service can expand your contacts, and help you explore new areas of work interests, and lead you into new opportunities both within your work community and outside of it if you're looking for a totally new direction. In lesson five, the next and final lesson, you'll put everything together and develop your personal action plan. That's when you'll actually take the next step in realizing your career success. If you're interested in going even further on this, I'd encourage you to create your own professional portfolio. You can do this as a culminating exercise in the Coursera specialization, Unlocking Your Professional Potential. This specialization gives you the opportunity to integrate the processes and models introduced in prior courses and apply them to a personal situation, that's one, defined by you using a personal action checklist. Anyways, back to this course, the upcoming lesson five, the last lesson in this specialization, leveraging the power of your professional community. It will help you use your personal and professional networks to advance your career.
