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How to build resilience to give your career a boost

18 Jan 2019

A lot of attention is given to the hard skills you need to succeed in the tech sector, but what about the soft skills? Developing resilience can give your career a vital boost. This is how you build it.

When talking about essential skills for the tech sector, things such as coding are quick to come up in conversation. The way to a lucrative career, people claim, is brushing up on AI, data analytics and cybersecurity.

While this may be true, it’s not all about hard skills. There are plenty of soft skills that could make a massive difference to your career, and one of them is resilience.

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, trauma, threats and any other source of stress. To be resilient is to be able to roll with the punches and handle whatever life throws at you. It’s a question of whether or not you can cope with the more difficult times in your career, which are both unfortunate and inevitable.

Who wouldn’t want to have this ability? It may feel like you either have that kind of grit or you don’t. As we’ve frequently noted in the Careers section, this couldn’t be further from the truth for resilience (or any soft skill for that matter).

The infographic below, provided by Davitt Corporate Partners, is jam-packed with incredibly helpful information that can help you become a more resilient person in the world of employment and beyond.

For one, your support network is vital to help you weather the worst interpersonal storm. If you have good people at home, good friends and colleagues you can relate to and confide in, even seemingly insurmountable challenges will be easier to overcome.

That being said, attempting to be stoic in the face of adversity will essentially negate the effect of this support group. What’s the point of having support if you refuse to utilise it? You need to accept help – not to mention you need to help others when they need it, too.

Sometimes, your to-do list will seem unending and the things on your plate impossible to achieve. That’s OK, normal even. Sometimes, even acknowledging that you’re experiencing stress is enough to alleviate it.

If this isn’t quite enough, it can be a good idea to reframe your experience and think, ‘OK, what is one thing I can accomplish today?’ Deciding upon and then completing that one task can help manage stress and, in turn, is invaluable practice in managing stress that is yet to come.

For more tips on building resiliency, check out the infographic below.

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Eva Short
By Eva Short

Eva Short was a journalist at Silicon Republic, specialising in the areas of tech, data privacy, business, cybersecurity, AI, automation and future of work, among others.

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