Twenties heralds arrival at crossroads for humans. It signifies end of carefree, teen life. Fresh graduates eye career options.
Undergrads venture into trade or jobs.
Age 20 is an ideal time for teenagers to make a perfect plan for their career growth. Brave hearts leave hearth and home seeking adventure and slice of heaven.
20s marks entry into full adulthood attained legally two years before.
Significance of 20
Despite, teenagers attaining 20s are not fully geared to meet new challenges of their age. Intrinsic hormonal changes continue to shape body, mind and thought patterns.
Bonds with parents and home are stronger. Curiosity about everything reigns supreme. Sense of freedom and adventure soars high.
Childhood and teen friendships wither and fade as fresh perceptions render these redundant.
Overcoming 20s challenges
Persons attaining 20 encounter fresh challenges.
Seeking work, financial independence, shedding old hobbies, relationships with opposite gender, insecurities over staying sans parental support are some myriad issues males and females attaining 20 will face.
20s also present excellent opportunities to acquire and develop several new life skills. Expertise acquired at the age come handy lifelong.
Importance of acquiring new skills
The world is getting competitive by the day. Skills learned at schools and universities are scant at best to compete in the rat race.
Higher dexterity levels, enhanced self-confidence, astute financial handling, interpersonal communications and unflinching endurance are required to content with newer and ever developing scenarios.
Degrees and academic qualifications are insufficient for breezing through lifespan.
There are at least 20 things you can do while 20s for successful future.
20 Things for Career Growth while you are 20
1. Personal finance management
20s is age when pocket money from parents begins ebbing. Learning thrift and astute finance management is imperative.
Planning expenses, distinguishing needs and wants, budgeting and savings are skills that come handy through out life. Maintaining accounts of income and expenses helps identify and plug holes in pocket.
This is a smart way of saving money, you never know, when this money will be useful in your career growth.
2. Selecting lifestyle
Everyone grows with some lifestyle, regardless of opulent or frugal. They observe and try fit into lifestyles lived by parents. 20s presents opportunities to choose independent ways of living.
With some financial independence, one may choose to upgrade existing lifestyle. Or, downsize existing one to fit into income and save for future.
3. Setting goals
Well defined goals set at this age help career growth and professional development. Identify and set short, mid-term and long-term goals.
Putting these goals on paper or PC is helpful.
Once life goals are fixed, identifying opportunities and threats becomes vital, Selecting and setting realistic goals based upon academics, personal interest, anticipated lifestyles, projected progress and financial uplift are some areas to be actively considered to enhance career growth.
4. Skill enhancing
These are essential to flourish and prosper at any chosen profession. Learning is termed lifelong process.
20s are best to embark on enhancing skills.
Reading, workshops, specialized courses, on-job training provide excellent avenues to hone existing skills, develop and acquire newer ones for career growth.
Fine-tuned and extra skills help time-proof employment, meaning you remain competent in job markets.
5. Balancing personality
Coy and boisterous behavior are opposites. During teens, these traits are pardoned, being considered part of growing up.
Extreme shyness or overtly clamorous behavior is undesirable post 20s. Others tend to shun people with such quirks.
Balancing personality to eradicate coyness and raucous behavior plays wonders while making new friends, seeking job and working as well as enhancing career growth.
6. Learn evils of addictions
Financial freedom and staying away from home is heady combination. It allows for learning newer things.
20s is also age when addictions are developed. These can be substance or non-substance dependencies.
These are alcohol, drug, psychotropic medications, food and motley other substances.
Non substance addictions include TV, Internet and social media, uncontrolled shopping, aberrant sexual desires and lots more.
Learning about their evil effects of by reading, meeting psychiatrists and counsellors helps defend against future addictions. One of every 10 persons falls prey to addictions, it is believed.
7. Organizational ingenuity
Teens are usually disorganized. This applies to all personal stuff, timing and food habits. Organizational skills, better described as self-discipline is best learned at 20s.
This includes organizing oneself physically- by keeping stuff tidy, adhering to self-made schedules for almost every daily activity, developing high degree self-control to stay tidy and on time.
8. Excellent health
“Health is wealth”, we all must know this, which is important for career growth.
Hectic work schedules combined with irregular food habits, excitement over exploring new stuff inadvertently takes toll on health.
Excellent health is supreme during 20s. It is decisive to your success now that will help shape future.
Engaging in health and fitness activities including jogging, cycling, exercises, yoga, aerobics and sports helps maintain physical and mental wellbeing.
9. Develop a hobby
Hobbies serve well to rid undesirable stress. Most people pursue hobbies such as collecting stamps, coins or reading while children.
These are sacrificed for glamour of the teens, never to be taken again.
The 20s provide excellent opportunities to revive lost hobbies or develop some anew. Work, higher studies or both augur stress.
Hobbies, however trivial, combat stress effectively and help retain childlike curiosity.
Clubs allow aficionados to pursue simple to complex hobbies ranging from philately, numismatics to trekking and amateur radio.
Hobby clubs are excellent getaways from mundane schedule and break monotonies of humdrum lifestyle.
10. Learn to cook
Nobody expects you to present an Epicurean feast. Cooking has many innate benefits. it keeps mind and body engaged, relieving stress.
It provides skills vital for survival in remote areas where restaurants may be miles afar or inexistent.
Cooking boosts self-confidence and helps maintain better health. Begin cooking simple food. Someday, this skill may help save lives.
11. Travel whenever, wherever possible
Traveling, it is said, is the best teacher. Indeed so. Travelling brings you into contact with perfect strangers in exotic places.
Travelling within or outside the country helps understand diverse culture and lifestyles.
It boosts self-confidence, obliterates coyness and helps develop adaptability to other places- essential if required to relocate.
12. Buy insurance
Youngsters would balk at thoughts of buying a life, healthcare insurance. Insurance companies charge much lesser premiums from young and healthy as compared with those older.
Buying insurance at 20s will help counter unexpected expenses during illness.
Life insurance secures loved ones against financial hardships loved ones could encounter due to any unforeseen eventuality.
13. Plan for retirement
Not going overboard but planning for retirement while in 20s indeed pays off. Retirement plans from banks, insurers and financial institutions charge lower from the young.
You can amass considerable wealth during an anticipated working span covering some 40 years. A retirement plan takes away loads of mental burden caused by uncertainty over future.
14. Moonlighting
This is another word for part time work. At 20s, you are full of vim and vigour. Channelize this energy into earning a few extra bucks.
Surplus income can be stashed away to buffer any ‘rainy days’ or investments in sound assets including future home, securities, hedge funds.
Working a couple of hours extra for a business that requires your skills but cannot afford full-time employees pays rich dividends.
You can also make some extra cash working on online jobs.
It helps increase skills, developing more contacts, keeps you busy while enriching financially.
15. Plan for marriage
You must be wondering that how marriage can be part of career growth? This is not absurd, as one would aver.
Humans are social animals and require trusted companionship at various junctures of life.
As kids and teenagers, this need stood fulfilled by parents, teachers and mentors. Plan about the type of person you would marry and project the lifestyle you desire after marriage.
Also at 20s, decide upon age when you would be willing to leave staying single. Loneliness kills and is greatest threat to professional, personal progress.
Marriage is a good idea to overcome loneliness in later stages of life.
16. Theme your social media
Teens post just about anything on Internet based social media pages including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Theme your content to suit your interest.
A focused Facebook page attracts more ‘friends.’
It serves as a social and professional networking tool with focus towards a particular activity or interest.
17. Entrepreneurship
Will Entrepreneurship not perfect idea of career growth?? Team up with friends to launch a small business, time and finances permitting.
This could be online at physical. Every corporate giant of the world has humble roots.
Starting at 20s is excellent. Crowd funding, or gathering cash from like-minded people to open a much desired, off-beat business results in higher income, better savings and an overall desirable future.
Regardless of success, such venture holds vital lessons in entrepreneurship.
18. Procure official documents
Increase in radical terrorism has become a bane of this world. Authorities are stringent while issuing official documents including passport, identification cards, aadhaar card, driving licenses and other similar stuff.
At 20s, you get an opportunity to procure these independently, sans the need for parental consent. Employers worldwide look for candidates with strong identification credentials.
19. Enrol as volunteer
Charity and social welfare organizations look for willing volunteers to work at various jobs.
This includes caregivers for elderly, disaster mitigation personnel, medical experts, accountants, engineers and people of various professions.
Volunteering helps one play a greater, productive role in the society. It helps overcome self-centric propensities.
Employers are impressed when they find a job applicant is helping some charity/ social cause as volunteer.
20. Quality time with self
Remember to spend at least 30 minutes a day with yourself. In complete solitude. Such time is utilized for positive introspection.
Utilize this time to identify grey areas of life and skills, finding ways and means to reduce and eliminate them. Everyone has dark patches that can be targeted and removed effectively, with conscious effort.
This helps develop a better personality.
Before embarkation
It is humanly impossible to embark on these 20 suggestions. Select those best suited to your individual needs. If required, discuss with parents or counsellors.
Weigh pros and cons of each venture carefully. It is your life at crossroads at 20s. Quality of decisions will contribute towards development of later stages of life.
