Career progression focuses on getting promoted and moving forward in your career in a steady fashion. While ‘steady’ can often mean ‘slow,’ it does not have to be with your career. Instead, you can make everything go much faster than you could have thought. Knowing a few invaluable skills is a large part of this.

While many of these will be specific to your field, there are more than a few soft skills that speed up your career progression. Learning and mastering these will have more of an impact on your career than you would expect. They will make you more likely to be promoted and actually move ahead.

Nobody wants to be stuck in a rut, so it is worth putting some effort into them.

Why New Skills Benefit Your Career

The fact that new skills speed up your career progression is a notable benefit to learning a few more of them. That is far from the only reason to consider them. They could provide a few other benefits to your career, making them more and more appealing. Some of the more notable include:

• They Open Doors – The more skilled you are in various ways, the more jobs you could be eligible for. You’ll also be more appealing to potential bosses, opening more and more doors for you. You could see yourself being eligible for more jobs than you thought you would.
• Makes You More Adaptable – The more limited your skill set is, the more limited you are as an employee. You simply would not be able to perform certain duties or handle specific situations. With new skills, you become much more adaptable, as you will be better prepared for certain situations.
• Keeps You Relevant – Some skills go out-of-date relatively quickly, while others take a bit longer for these. That makes you less and less relevant unless you upskill or learn any new skills. By keeping up with your industry, you make sure you’re always relevant in your role.

That does not mean all skills are made equally. Instead, some will have more of an impact on your career than others, making them more worth focusing on. Five particular skills that speed up your career progression stand out with this. They should have more benefits on your career than you would think.

It is worth diving into what they are.

Skills That Speed Up Your Career Progression: Five Top Options

1. Problem Solving

You will inevitably come into problems during your career, though many of them will be unexpected. Things might not go to plan, and there might be some unintended consequences of particular decisions. You will need to know how to deal with this, so you will need to have comprehensive problem solving skills.

The better able you can do this, the better you will stand out in your role. It lets you build a reputation as a problem-solver who can get things done. While this takes some time and effort to work on, it will reap greater and greater rewards in the long-term.

2. Change Management

Companies change and evolve over time, but not all of these changes can be positive or welcome. Even the most positive ones can be difficult to get through. By being able to manage these changes and make sure things go as smoothly as possible, you can make everything seamless.

The better-able you can do this, the more likely you will stand out among your coworkers. You will also show you are invaluable to the company for adapting and getting through difficult times. The more you do this, the more you will stand out and speed up your career progression. It is an essential skill you will need to learn if you want to become a leader.

3. Public Speaking

Depending on your job, there is a decent chance you will need to do some public speaking at some point or another. During these times, the focus will be on you and you will need to make sure you make the right impression. It is natural to feel nervous and even anxious when you are doing this.

By working on your public speaking skills, you can make things much easier for yourself. At the same time, you can make sure you are doing the presentation well and leaving the best impression possible. It could be worth practicing this as much as possible and getting more comfortable speaking in public.

4. Communication

You will have to communicate with quite a few people during your career. As obvious as that is, it does not mean you would have put effort into communicating properly at work. You will need to make sure you can do this, as it makes sure everyone’s on the same page.

Active listening, being clear, and multiple other factors play into this. There are also differences between communicating at work and communicating in your personal life. No matter what these differences are and make sure you keep things professional, yet courteous.

5. Empathy

Everyone needs some form of leadership skills if they want to excel in their career. That can be a relatively broad term, however, and can be broken down into various skills. Empathy is one of the more notable. By being empathetic, you can better understand coworkers and anyone you manage.

It helps with conflict resolution, figuring out why employees were not able to achieve particular goals, and more. It is worth spending time honing your empathy skills so you can lead much better and actually progress your career.

Skills That Speed Up Your Career Progression: Wrapping Up

You will need a mix of hard and soft skills to advance in your career. As obvious as many of these are, some of them are not. By knowing the right soft skills that speed up your career progression, you could be surprised by how fast you will move ahead in your career.

While you will have to put some time and effort into this, there is no reason not to spend time on them. With the benefits they offer, they should be some of the first things you consider working on. Communication, problem solving, change management, and similar skills are notable among these.

If you have found yourself in a rut, there is no reason not to invest some time and effort on them.