Advice for your career: Attitude and Time

Our amazing Apprenticeship coach, Sally Hegab, meets apprentices every day and works to help them progress through their qualifications. We asked Sally to sum up the advice that tells our learners and apprentices, into two points and then elaborate.

1. Attitude

Having the right attitude at work could be the difference between someone getting a promotion, better pay, a good reference, or simply feeling fulfilled as a person.

This is an example of how attitude went a long way, in my career…

I was working in the events department in a teleconferencing company. As technology advanced, people in my team were most unwilling to learn new innovative tools. I took this as an opportunity to learn it inside out and became the expert. I was the go-to person for Cisco WebEx events, I created online events for conferences with up to 500 people for very impressive companies. The managers recognised my efforts and chose me as the only person from the UK office to go to Amsterdam (fully paid) for training. I was then responsible for training new starters on the platform. This helped me get promoted into Sales, giving the opportunity to advance both in skills and salary!

Successful people never say, ‘that’s not my job role’. They take on above and beyond their job role, carving their experience, inch by inch, and what is more important than skills, or experience? One word. Attitude.

2. Time. Use it wisely!

There are 168 hours in a week — for everybody on this planet. We can never say “I was not given enough time this week”. That’s one thing we’re all equal on… Time.

With 168 hours a week the world has made doctors, athletes, entrepreneurs, writers and much more. Do they have more time?

On average, we spend a substantial portion of our day: eating, drinking, grooming, cleaning, doing the bare minimum, working, killing time with family and friends, and sleeping. What is left does not seem like much. But, in retrospect, when you summarise your year — your weeks, months and years, it is certainly worth it in the long run being consistent with what may seem like small actions, towards what we want to achieve. Always having the bigger picture in mind.

The saying goes “it’s no good crying over spilt milk”, so we can either clean up the mess or milk a new cow. Take control of the time that seems to slip through your fingers. What have you wanted to do for a long time, that you never got a chance to do?