By: Jackie Williams

Change is afoot in the workplace, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how this translates into the way we act in organizations where we work and volunteer. Your ability to delineate and live in accordance with sound business and personal values is no longer a soft skill. Don’t apologize for your career decisions! Over the course of a professional life, a person might expect to have three different careers and hold eight to ten jobs. Women need to understand early on that they can chart their own course rather than react to the trends of the day.

Building strong relationships, ties, is a competitive advantage. If you develop a web of strong contacts, they will repeatedly connect you with opportunities, and you can use this advantage when you encounter challenges. Traditional networking is not what I mean. Going beyond networking to establishing lasting relationships both in business as well as in your personal life can boost your career. This is something women seem to grasp intuitively, but some of us forget it in the bustle of our lives. Women value connections and are good at both making and developing relationships with other people. A woman in her fifties told me, “I keep in close touch with six women friends from business school. We get together for a retreat annually. Friendships are like gold to me.”

Learn to chart your own course. Good annual reviews don’t necessarily lead to promotions even if you’re still in the workplace. “Climbing the ladder” is an outmoded model for success. Making a lateral move is frequently the right choice because it nearly always offers you the ability to implement a new career tactic and it sets you up to achieve something even better in the future. Especially if you’re making a midlife career change, a lateral move might be exactly the right thing to do. Also consider what one woman told me: “Time in both corporate as well as entrepreneurial environments is invaluable.”

Cultivate your family life, and choose the balance between work and family life that works for you. Some professionals and entrepreneurs blend the two. Work-life balance doesn’t need to be a code word for mommy-stuff; men need to think about this too. If you’re on a hiatus from paid work, consider joining a volunteer board of directors. This will help you maintain your skills and develop new skills while spending the majority of your time at home. And when it’s time to return to the workplace, you have valuable experience to list on your resume. Don’t make the mistake of taking just any old job on any old board of directors. Look for volunteer experience that either maintains your skills or takes you in the direction you want to go when you return to the workforce. Let me use myself as an example. Before I became an executive coach, I had a long career in investment management. I do not intend to return to that career because I enjoy what I’m doing now. Because I enjoyed many aspects of that career, however, I have maintained my skills by serving on my church’s endowment committee, of which I am now chair. I would list this on my resume if I planned to return to investment management, and I would be sure to tell my prospective employer that I have performed regular investment reviews of the portfolio and have researched and implemented various asset allocation changes. The more specific you can be, the better!

Successful women discover that regular reflection on their career goals and achievement pays extraordinary dividends. Don’t be afraid to leverage your abilities in new directions. Be explicit about your new goals, even to the point of writing them down. Don’t neglect to get further training that enables you to keep abreast of changes in the workplace. Don’t make the mistake of going into an interview unprepared to discuss the changes that have occurred in your field since you last worked in it. Continue your subscription to professional journals, and read them! And when you set new goals, examine barriers to reaching those goals. Addressing how to overcome obstacles is a large part of what I do in coaching. Breaking out of the boxes your earlier roles put you in can require creative repositioning, but doing so can result in greater professional development throughout your career. If you envision your success, you’re more likely to achieve it. Retain a yen for growth and development.

Some professionals may decide to rethink their strategies from the beginning, and it’s very common among professional women at least to make midcourse corrections. That’s how to stay powerful! As one woman told me, “Be relentless about working toward identifying/realizing your dreams. If you don’t, no one else can do it for you.”