Your professional life is a big part of how you live the rest of your life. The hours you work, how often you work and what kind of job you have all determines what you do in your free time and how you live your life.

Luckily you are never stuck in the same job, even if it feels that way. There are a number of different things you can do to start growing and becoming the successful professional you want to be.

Here are five things you can do to start improving yourself professionally:

Connect

If you really want to up your chances of getting a job or providing yourself with extra career opportunities such as remote work or even contract work you will want to start making connections. It could also mean returning the favor to others and helping them out in their professional career.

This could be people you went to college with, people you did internships with and even people who you work with. This may mean spending your weekends going to conferences and meeting people who are where you want to be and asking them for advice or even help on how to achieve your goals.

Practice

There is nothing better than the simple idea of practicing something everyday. Just like a musician needs to practice everyday or a writer needs to write everyday whatever you want to become an expert in you will want to do it everyday.

Take web development as an example. If you want to get a job in web development or even just perfect your skills in a certain coding language you will want to practice everyday. This may mean downloading a coding app and spending ten minutes on it during your lunch break. Obviously you will have to put in more time than that but the key is doing it everyday so your brain doesn’t forget everything you have learned.  

Keep Learning

The workplace is extremely different than what is was ten or even five years ago. With the way technology is advancing you will need to keep your skills fresh. This also means you will have to be continually adding new tools to your list of skills on your resume.

To keep up with all of the changes you can take classes for online degrees that will teach you different topics about almost anything. This will let you develop a certain skill set without having to go back to college or take time off from your job.

Get Passionate

You do not have to love everything about your job because most of the time a job is full of tedious things that can be boring. What you do have to do is be able to talk about things passionately and persuade others that you can get excited about a certain task or ability.

This is particularly useful in connecting with other business professionals and being interviewed. If you can answer the interview question of ‘tell be about yourself’ in a manner that is passionate and engaging you will have a much higher chance at a second interview and job offer.  

Keep a Healthy Perspective

You will not be able to be a CEO or senior manager overnight. These are jobs that take years of experience and a lot of patience and the right timing. Understand that what you are doing today will influence your career later in life.

So if you want to get somewhere you will have to start taking small steps to get to your final destination. If you feel like you are completely stuck just know that you can also take action to change your job and get unstuck.

Where do you want to be in your professional life 5 years from now? What steps do you need to take in order to accomplish those goals and make them a reality? Be sure to share this with a friend and see what they think of it to start a conversation.