7 Steps To Getting Paid More And Promoted Faster

When you begin to use them yourself, you put your entire life and career onto the fast track. You will make more progress in the next couple of years than the average person makes in 10 or 20 years. Here are 7 ways to get started:
1. Find a High-Growth Industry
You can make more progress toward getting paid more and getting promoted faster in a couple of years in a high-growth industry than you might in five or 10 years in a slow-growth industry.
Once you have identified a high-growth industry, do your homework. Research and find out what companies in that industry are growing the most rapidly. Remember, 20 percent of the companies in any industry make 80 percent of the profits. They have better leadership, better products and services, better technology, and a better future. These are the companies where you want to work.
2. Select the Right Boss

Choosing the right boss is one of the most important decisions that you ever make. It can accelerate your career and enable you get paid more and promoted faster than almost anything else you do.
You should look upon accepting a job as if you were entering into a marriage, with your boss as your spouse. He or she is going to have an enormous impact on how much you get paid, how much you enjoy your work, how rapidly you get promoted, and every other part of your work life.
When you are looking for a job, you should interview your potential boss carefully to make sure that he or she is the kind of person you would enjoy working with and for. This should be someone whom you would respect and look up to, someone who is friendly and supportive and on whom you can depend to help you move ahead as rapidly as possible. Whenever possible, you should talk to other people who work for that boss.
3. Develop a Positive Attitude
Fully 85 percent of your success in work, no matter how intelligent or skilled you are, is going to be determined by your attitude and your personality. Your overall success, how much you are paid, and how fast you are promoted will be largely determined by how much people like you and want to help you. 
4. Create a Positive Image
It is absolutely amazing how many people are held back, year after year, because no one has ever taken them aside and told them how important their external appearance is to getting paid what they are truly worth.
The first rule is that you should always dress for success in your job and in your company. Look at the top people in your industry. Look at the top people in your company. Look at the pictures in newspapers and magazines of the men and women who are being promoted to positions of higher responsibility and pay. Pattern yourself after the leaders, not the followers.
5. Start Earlier, Work Harder, and Stay Later
Develop a workaholic mentality. There is nothing that will bring you to the attention of the important people in your work life faster than for you to get a reputation as a hard, hard worker.

Everybody knows who the hard workers are in every business. The hardest workers are always the most respected in any company of value. They are always paid more and promoted faster for a very simple reason: They are more productive. They get more work done in a shorter period of time. They are more valuable to the company. They set a better example, and are the kind of people bosses are proud of and want to keep more than anyone else.

6. Push to the Front
One of the most important ways to come out ahead is for you to continually ask for more responsibility. Volunteer for every assignment. Go to your boss at least once every week and ask him or her for more responsibility.

Most people in the world of work do only what is asked of them. But this is not for you. Your job is to keep asking for more, and, whenever you are given a new responsibility, to fulfill it quickly and well. Remember: You want to develop a reputation for being the kind of person who is given the responsibility whenever someone wants to get something done quickly.
Do you want a promotion? Getting one is very much under your control. The fact is that you promote yourself every time you take on a new responsibility. You will eventually rise to the level of the responsibility you are willing to accept.

7. Ask for What You Want

This is one of the most important success principles you will ever learn to help put your career onto the fast track: The future belongs to the askers. The future does not belong to those people who sit back, wishing and hoping that their lives and their work will become better. The future belongs to those people who step up and ask for what they want. If they don’t get it, they ask again and again until they do.







SOURCE: www.fastcompany.com