Carreira

11 Lessons to Accelerate your career

With March being Women’s History Month, I decided to continue with the theme of “professional sisterhood” that I started on International Women’s Day. In earlier posts this month, I shared what members of Citi’s Connect group would tell their younger self aboutcareer and money, as well as what advice several colleagues from Citi would share.
To wrap up this series, I invited participants in Citi’s Women in Risk program, which provides accelerated development for women working in the company’s risk function, to share what they would tell to someone looking to accelerate her – or his – career. Provided below is my curated list of 11 lessons distilled from interviews with Rachel Doyle, Bengi Gulalp, Diana Lozano, Elena Sartor, Lu Shi, Barbara Sobala, Maggie Xie, and Ki-sook Yoo, among others. 1. Find the type of networking that fit your style and interests to make the time and effort invested valuable and fun. Keep good connections not only with your immediate team but also outside your team. And, while meeting people is important, cultivating long-term relationships is more important. 2. Take charge of shaping your career. No one else is going to make things happen for you unless you put it on the table. Create a career development plan with well-defined goals and tactical steps for what skills you need to acquire, etc. Communicate it to your managers, mentors and sponsor(s). Review it each year, at least. If you don’t meet a goal, have an open discussion with your manager about what you can work on for next year. 3. Do your job well. People will support you if they think you are capable and have potential. Appreciate every lesson learned especially those that were the most challenging. 4. Go long on industry knowledge and really, really understanding both the big picture issues and the skills to dive deep and understand technical concepts. Real skills – fundamental and industry skills – remain invaluable for