Work Survival Tips

Adapted from: Reile DM and Nickols JL. Survival Strategies for Your New Career. 2002; 55–64.

Establishing Goals

It has been said that life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans. For some people, life is what happens because they aren’t making other plans. Establishing goals help you to achieve the kind of life you want. The first step is to examine each area of your life. Think about the next 5, 10, and 20 years. Put together a list of what you hope to accomplish in these areas:

• Personal
• Family
• Social
• Spiritual
• Financial
• Intellectual
• Professional
• Societal

You may want to post this list in a prominent place so that you can refer to it at least once a month. This will help you keep track of your goals and aid you in ascertaining your progress in reaching them.

Project Management

Goal setting and project management are intricately connected. People often fail to achieve their goals, not because their goals can’t be achieved, but because they try to complete them all at once. You didn’t complete your pharmacy training in a day, a week, a month, a semester, or even a year. You completed your training one course at a time, one day at a time, one semester at a time. Many of our personal and professional goals need to be viewed in the same way. By breaking goals into small, manageable, immediately achievable tasks, even the biggest goals can be accomplished.

Staying Connected

The importance of staying connected to and being actively involved in professional associations cannot be stressed enough. At the beginning of your career, you need these connections more than ever. Professional associations help you learn about new techniques, legislation that impacts your work, continuing education that advances your knowledge, and contacts that will help you get your next job. Staying involved with associations gives you a voice and some influence in the growth and direction of the pharmacy profession.

Additionally, you need to stay connected to your job. Make allies at all levels. Never allow yourself to become isolated. Once you are out of the loop, you stop receiving the kind of inside information on which an organization runs. Gossip and office politics are things to avoid; but knowing the departmental budget, who has the ear of the director, and which projects are high profile will help you better manage your career.