Do you ever wonder why some people are on a perpetual growth path in their career? Everything just seems to go their way. They’re given the best assignments, get regular promotions and rise through the ranks – seemingly without effort. Well, effort is the key: Regular, steady, focused effort. These people understand that career development is a mindset.

Cappelli and Hamori conducted research to understand the changing characteristics of executives from 1980 to 2001. In just roughly 20 years, a lot had changed in terms of what it took to get to the top of an organization. With the increased pace of innovation, the degree of technological change, and old rules being broken, the requirements for future C-level leaders are bound to change even more.

How is your company’s communication? Is your company’s communication clear and efficient and aimed at driving results or increasing connection? Or do team members talk a lot without saying anything that moves the needle? Maybe you remember this model from my previous blog: 4 Steps To Fast, Effective Meetings where we addressed the types of communication that created efficient and effective meetings that keep your team happy and executing with high accountability.

Bootstrapping is the process of using limited personal resources to get a business started, then reinvesting profits to grow it without the aid of outside investors. If done effectively, this is a great startup strategy – especially as you answer to no one but yourself. The values in bootstrapping: It’s all on you, so you will work even harder for your success. You manage time more effectively. It forces you to focus on what matters. You own it.

Shutterstock We’ve all been there — that little stomach flutter as you read over the job description. Everything just seems to sync up between what they want and what you’re offering. It’s like they knew they loved you before they met you. You haven’t even finished editing your resume and you’re already daydreaming about new business cards. This might be the one, the long-fabled dream job that you’ve been working towards since college graduation.

It feels good to grow your LinkedIn network. It’s satisfying to see your first-degree connection count climbing. Most of us want to add more LinkedIn connections — not lose the ones we’ve got! But sometimes it makes sense to prune the rosebush and snip some of your LinkedIn connections. I didn’t realize when I joined LinkedIn back in 2003 that not everyone has the same point of view about networking.

Shutterstock Continuous improvement can be a very valuable discipline, but it can also be deadly trap. So it would be useful to know which it is, in any given situation. Here is how. First of all, imagine you are running a factory. Your job is improve the quality metric, which currently stands at 500. After your first month, you have raised it to 750. Excellent work! At the end of the second month, you have raised it to 875.

Shutterstock Are you looking to decide which career path you’d like to pursue with a mind to pull in a healthy salary? Do you live in – or would like to live in – New York City? If you answered yes to these questions, we may have some tips for you. Recently online career info and job search platform, Glassdoor.com, recently came out with a look at which jobs lead to high wages in the Big Apple. The results are quite varied though many rely on tech skills.

As more and more people work from home, creating a livable (and productive) workspace is an important undertaking. Recently Maxwell Ryan, CEO of Apartment Therapy, sat down with FORBES to discuss some tips for turning your home office into a personal sanctuary. After being an elementary school teacher for seven years in New York City, Ryan decided to pursue his passion for home design.

Dear Liz, I am the HR Manager in a legal services firm and I’ve got my hands full. It’s a good company but before I arrived here one year ago, they went through several reorganizations and leadership changes and since I got here there have been more changes. My CEO suggested that we conduct an Employee Engagement Survey but I think that might just frustrate our employees even more. In my experience when people are upset, they don’t want to fill out a survey.