More than half, 56% of workers are looking for a new job or plan to do so in 2025, according to October 2024. Resume Templates Survey of 1,258 full-time US workers. One in three of them plans to quit their current job even if they don’t have another one planned.
Whatever your career plans for 2025 — whether you’re looking for a new gig, hoping for a promotion, or simply looking to get better at your current position — there are steps you can take now progress.
Here are three tips from a professor of organizational psychology and author of “Likeable Badass” Alison Fragale on how to prepare for success in 2025.
Determine your goals
To get started, start identifying what you’d like to accomplish in the new year — or even a few years down the road.
“We want to look forward into the future to the point where the achievement is what we want to have,” says Fragale, adding that it might be that “you’ve created a product or you’ve started a mentoring program,” for example. You can put whatever you want on your resume or whatever you would be proud of.
Then, you want to work backwards from that point and come up with some actionable steps to do that. In 2025, those steps will help you make decisions when you look at your to-do list, Fragale says. “When everything can’t be done, which of these things will most push me forward toward those goals?”
Identify ‘three to five relationships’ to make them easier to achieve
Once you’ve figured out what you want to achieve, identify “three to five relationships that will help you achieve that goal,” says Fragale. These can be people who have built similar products or who have been in the position you want to reach, whoever you think can help you make that progress.
Then “start thinking about how you can add value to their life in 2025,” she says. Can you help them with a project they are working on? Can you make a useful introduction? Can you share any new research that is relevant to their work? Helping them first can build your relationship into something more meaningful that can be reciprocated.
Try to touch base with them twice a year to maintain those relationships. That way, if and when I can finally help you, you’ll make that connection and have a natural opportunity to ask.
Feel ‘comfortable talking about your wins’
Finally, “feel comfortable talking about your wins,” says Fragale.
This could mean sending an email telling your boss about some of the things you accomplished this week or that your team accomplished. This might mean coming up with a good way to answer the question “how’s work?” in your personal life that highlights one or two things you did well.
If your success happens “behind closed doors,” says Fragale, “nobody knows about it,” and you can’t reap the benefits.
By simply knowing how to showcase her victories, Fragale met “some of the people who have become the most important to me professionally” in places such as “an airport bar, my kid’s birthday party.”
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