This article was originally posted on Design Your Career.

Does the future of work scare you? Good. It should!

A little fear is a perfect motivator to shake us out of our current reality and force us to confront the future head-on. Careers in the future will look completely different, but at the end of the day, the important elements needed in the workplace will remain the same. These include soft skills like communication, leadership, and the ability to self-motivate. 

Employers of the future will also expect you to quickly pick up new skills and approach new challenges head-on. You’re not going to know everything when you head into a new job, but that’s okay. What’s more important is how you interpret information and apply it to new situations.

It’s tough to think that a uni course won’t prepare you for a future career, but guess what? You’re in a position right now to set yourself up for success.

It won’t be easy, but it’s incredibly important.

So how can you start building a bulletproof career? It’s all in your mindset.

Benefits of a growth mindset

Your mindset is the way you think about the world and approach new situations. It’s your thirst for knowledge, life, and adventure. 

A growth mindset allows you to develop your own intelligence in any situation because you have a desire to learn and synthesise information. 

This is how you should think about the career. Not like making it to the end of a book, but more like going on a quest where you don’t quite know where you’ll end up. Because that’s the fun of life. Staying flexible to say yes to new opportunities and learning new things.

At various points, perhaps even at numerous points, in your working life you will have to reinvent yourself or at the very least change the basis upon which you earn a living. It is unrealistic to rail against the forces of change. You need to get comfortable with change. You need to see how others have managed this process and extract learnings and lessons.

SOURCE: FUTUREFIT BY ANDREA CLARKE

Those with a growth mindset…

  • Embrace new challenges 
  • Persist in the face of adversity 
  • Enjoy putting in the effort
  • Learn from feedback
  • Learn from the mistakes and successes of others

5 practical ways to build a bulletproof career mindset

So that’s all well and good you’re saying, but how do I actually build this so called ‘bulletproof career mindset’?

  1. Change the way you view your working future. If you see your future career as an adventure where there will be many opportunities to grow and change direction, you’ll be much more comfortable adapting to a changing environment.
  2. Become a life long learner. The world doesn’t stop learning and growing and neither should you. Focus on adapting learning as a habit into your everyday life.
  3. Build your reputation capital (over your personal brand). Think of yourself as the brand manager for your most important product – yourself!
  4. Gain soft skills through real life experiences. It’s interesting to note many of these crucial future skills that fall under the ‘soft skills’ category are not taught explicitly in school and higher education. Rather, these are skills that are developed over time through application of learning and real-life experiences.
  5. Focus on the things you can control. This includes constantly up-skilling yourself, improving your social connections and observing the horizon for incoming opportunities and threats.

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