By Pat Meehan

In your job search and through building your resume you have discovered some new things about yourself. You have become much more self-aware of your skills and accomplishments and now it’s time to start evaluating where you are now and where you want to go from here.

So, where are you now? Because you are still reading this article, you are much farther along than you were before you started. As your habit of self-awareness develops daily and gets stronger over time, you will become a being of continuous improvement. Once you start identifying and implementing your self-improvement activities, the process of your continuous improvement will carry on over your lifetime.

People who work on self-improvement activities daily keep in tune with and ahead of their constantly changing world. For instance, let’s talk about the computer system you use at work. As little as fifteen years ago, only certain categories of employees were required to have excellent computer skills. Today however, every job has computer skill requirements. Hourly employees log in and log out of work each day by swiping an ID card through a computer scanner. Every employee who has a desk at work has a computer on that desk. We all send and receive e-mails daily. Hourly production workers enter data into the company’s computer system to report production numbers, raw material usage, quality control, etc.

Every cashier, customer service rep, inventory control clerk, department vice-president, ATM user, bank teller, UPS driver, postal worker, and every other person in the workforce uses a computer in his/her job. This brings up a very important question for you to ask yourself. The question is, “am I the best in my department at utilizing the computer system I use at work?” If your answer is no, then a self-improvement opportunity has just jumped into your lap. You are now accountable to be as good as or better than anyone else in your department who utilizes that computer system. To be the best it might require some reading outside of work. You may need to spend some time at work before you log in or after you log out. Whatever it takes, you are determined to become expert at that specific skill. You want to be so good at that computer that others start asking you for help. When others ask you for help they have realized your leadership value. This will be noticed by many people within your company.

Everything you do in your job, whether it is technical, manual, written, or spoken, is an opportunity for self-improvement for the accountable person. Your identification and self-awareness of the skills and talents that you have identified for yourself in your current job are vital to your upward mobility. Unless you have truly identified these skills and talents that you possess, it is literally impossible to identify your opportunities for self-improvement. Realizing your skills comes from self-awareness which is an automatic catalyst to self-improvement.

Each person has many opportunities for self-improvement that fall in line with his/her self –awareness, or “realized, developed skills.” The recipe for effective self-improvement is as follows: A person’s developed skills must be realized through becoming accountable to himself/herself, which leads that person to self-awareness. Once self-awareness is ingrained in habit, the search for self-improvement becomes an ever evolving natural course.

Recommended reading for self improvement: Winning Impression - Social Media Recruitment Strategy & Training