15 Ways to Make the Most of Your Career this Summer

The July 4th Weekend has come and gone, which means summer is now here and in full swing. While the living might be easy, you still need to have your foot on the gas pedal heading into fall. Here are some great ways new grads and experienced professionals can make the most of their career this summer.

1. Re-discover your career personality interests. This includes taking personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Depending on what you have done with your career or academic life, your type may have changed. If you don’t know what the MBTI is, take a quick spin on Wikipedia.
2. Discover your strengths. Many of us take jobs for functional and practical reasons but do not understand how these jobs fit within our strengths. The book StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a great one for discovering what parts of you can be amplified so you knock your job prospects out of the park.
3. Find a job. The end of June is sometimes the beginning of a new fiscal year for many companies, so hiring is on the rise again.
4. Take a vacation. Not taking one costs the United States $344 billion dollars a year, not to mention the cost of mental health. By the way, airline tickets have also been the lowest in years.
5. Pick up a new skill. With longer days ahead and slower days at work, you can do much online for free on platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, Codeacademy, and many more.
6. Mentor someone. It’s good for the soul, and with work being much more temporary these days, a missing ingredient at work.
7. Find ways to expand your footprint at work. In marketing, for example, look at ways to take your content further by sharing what blogs you may have written to other places like LinkedIn Pulse or Medium.
8. Build your professional brand. Start an email list, build your own website, build a following on Twitter, and discover your voice.
9. Exercise more with the longer hours. It’s good for creativity and your brainpower.
10. Practice your networking in a more casual environment. Instead of speaking about you, ask about the person at the other end of the table. You’ll discover a lot more than you imagined.
11. Get into the mood of entrepreneurship, even if it’s selling your old junk on eBay. See how much money you can spend.
12. Pick up a fiction book. With so much non-fiction already coming in via work and the news lately, this will help you get away for a bit and build your creative juices.
13. Visit a museum and learn about something new.
14. Take your intern out to lunch. See what they are learning in school and pick something up from them — Snapchat, anyone?
15. Relax — it’s summer!

What do you have planned?

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