6 Strategies to Never Lose a Job and Have Rapid Career Growth

Would you like to ensure that you never lose a job?

And get quick promotions and raises throughout your career?

Of course you would. Especially now.

With the damage that the pandemic has done to the economy, many people have lost their jobs. And even more are worried about the stability of their existing job.

As chaos and uncertainty in the employment market become the new normal, many need help navigating these tumultuous times.

I’m no stranger to precarious employment circumstances. Before I started writing about self-improvement and weight loss, I spent 20 years working in small, cash-strapped startups.

These weren’t the companies you’ve heard of that made gajillionaires out of their employees. These were the ones that didn’t make it, that were constantly on the verge of shutting down.

I’ve never worked at a profitable company. Once, I had the task of selling the furniture to cover payroll. There was another time when I got money in the bank for payroll with less than two minutes to spare. That’s how crazy these sorts of companies can be.

But despite going through more rounds of layoffs than I can count, I personally have never been laid off. The only times I’ve lost a job were when the entire company shut down.

Instead, I had extremely rapid job advancement. It took 12 years for me to rise to the level of Controller, (head of Accounting), and 17 years to reach Chief Financial Officer. Despite having the wrong degree, only taking one Accounting class in college, not having a CPA, MBA, or any other certification, and taking two years off for a useless film degree.

How did I do it?

There are six strategies I used.

Any one of these will ensure you never lose a job.

Combining a few of these methods will ensure lightning-fast career advancement.

1. Fill a vital function, and do a good job at it

Volunteer to take on a task that somebody is going to have to do as long as the company is in business.

At an early-career job, I stepped forward to handle billing.

As the financials got worse and worse, the company looked to save money by eliminating employees they could get by without. But they’d always need someone to bill customers.

So no matter how bad things got, my job was secure. As long as I was decent at it.

An important caveat here is that you do need to actually be competent.

Bungling a vital role is a quick way to lose a job, as it will quickly become obvious the company needs to replace you.

2. Bring in or save more than you cost the company

The idea that everything in business comes down to the bottom line just isn’t true.

Companies are simply a group of people acting together. Every decision a business makes is made by a person – a person with real human emotions who genuinely cares about doing the right thing.

But some decisions come down to the bottom line.

A company employs someone because they add more value than it costs the company to employ them.

But it’s often hard to measure how much value someone adds. And when a company runs into financial trouble, it has to make difficult decisions.

Managers have to decide how much value each individual employee gives the company relative to their cost, in order to determine who to lay off.

Nobody wants to do this. It’s a sad reality. If they don’t, the company will go bankrupt and then everyone will lose their jobs.

How do you make sure you’re not one of the people that gets laid off?

By making it obvious that you add much more value than you cost.

The easiest way to do this is by bringing in lots of money.

No business ever lays off a successful salesperson.

But you don’t have to be in sales for this to work.

You can also demonstrate your value to the company by saving money.

A few years into my career, I caught a mistake that would have cost the company $600,000.

I was getting paid $60,000 at the time.

In 30 minutes, I paid for my annual salary ten times over.

That ensured I’d have a job at that company as long as I wanted one.

Management knew I might do something like that again.

And they were humans with human emotions, so they were grateful for me going above and beyond my job description to help out the company.

This also helped with career growth.

My boss at the time went on to work somewhere else. When I told him I was interested in the new company, he immediately hired me, with a better title and much higher pay.

3. Be a Rockstar at something

There are lots of tools, pieces of equipment, and software that your company uses.

Find one a lot of people aren’t very good at.

Then become a complete rockstar at it.

Be the one everybody comes to for help. Who amazes the entire workforce with what you can do.

You’ll be too valuable for the company to lose.

I worked with a woman who was a PowerPoint rockstar.

When the CEO wanted decks for investors and million-dollar enterprise-level sales pitches, he went to her. Even though that wasn’t her regular job.

Then the company eliminated her entire department. But it created a new job for her in a different department, because the CEO needed her.

For me, I was a rockstar at Excel.

Which brings me to an announcement:

Announcing Rockstar Excel

My Excel skills were a big factor in how I was able to have such a successful career. My wife is also an Excel rockstar, which has given her quite a bit of success as well.

We want to share this with others.

So we’ve created the site Rockstar Excel.

At Rockstar Excel, you can submit any questions you have about Excel, and we’ll answer them for free. Be sure to follow the Excel Answers blog for tips and tricks on how you can be an Excel rockstar, and @rockstarexcel on Twitter to be notified when new posts come out.

We will soon be offering courses, seminars, and consulting as well.

SelfHelpingYourself will continue to focus on Self Improvement and Weight Loss made easy, so the contents of the two sites will be entirely separate.

Now, back to the article.

4. Be the one who knows what’s going on

Businesses are complicated.

They have a lot of internal processes and procedures. Different individuals have different methods of doing things.

No matter how smart, knowledgeable, and experienced you are, when you come into a company, there’s a big learning curve in terms of understanding how things work.

This is especially true in companies with complicated or unusual business models, and companies that go through rapid growth or changes.

Learn as much as you can about how the business works. Go beyond your own job and department, and try to understand the business as a whole.

Learn the various internal processes, and how they fit together.

This is extra useful if you’re at a smaller company, or a company with a lot of employee turnover.

After some time, you may end up as the only one who really understands how certain important things work.

At which point, you’re practically irreplaceable.

This is a great time to get a huge pay raise and title change, because the company really really doesn’t want to lose you.

There are some important caveats to this:

First, I am absolutely not suggesting that you should keep secrets or hoard knowledge.

Never intentionally act against your employer’s interest.

That short-sighted nonsense will kill your career.

Be willing to explain what you know, and train people if asked.

But as long as everyone else is too busy, inexperienced, unskilled, or new to learn the information that only you understand, take advantage of that.

The second caveat is that while you’re using this opportunity to advance your career and increase your salary, don’t push your employer too hard.

You don’t want them to resent you.

Which brings up the next item.

5. Be someone people are happy to work with

If you’re someone that people are happy to work with, then people will want to work with you.

Which sounds obvious, but it’s worth pointing out how important this is for your career.

Be friendly and cheerful toward your peers, bosses, and employees.

Volunteer to help out – whether it’s the CEO or receptionist.

Get your work done on time, and make it high quality.

Make your coworkers’ lives easier.

Never complain.

Erase the phrase “that’s not my job” from your vocabulary.

Don’t gossip, insult, belittle, or criticize people.

Remember, business decisions are made by people, with all of their human biases.

If you’re someone they like, they’ll want to keep you and promote you.

When you look for jobs in the future, the people you’ve worked with will want to hire you, or refer you to openings they know about.

By contrast, being someone people don’t want to work with is devastating to your career.

I once had a boss who was brilliant. He could get a huge amount of work done in a short amount of time, was incredibly insightful, and I learned a ton from him.

But he was constantly screaming, insulting people, and throwing tantrums.

He was fired after six weeks, just for being a jerk.

Don’t be that guy.

6. Be a beast

Some people are incredibly fast and efficient.

They can do the work of three people, and still be out in time for happy hour.

If you can be a beast like this, it attaches a jet engine to your career.

Can you learn to be a beast, or is it an innate talent that only certain people have?

I’m not sure.

But here are my suggestions on how you can at least move in the right direction:

• Always look for ways to improve your recurring processes.
• If you have a system or process that seems clunky or dumb, stop and think if it really makes sense to do it that way, or if you can come up with a better way.
• Apply what you learn in one context to other contexts.
• When you encounter one-off situations where the method you know how to do is clunky and dumb, but you suspect there’s a better way, be willing to invest the time to figure out/learn the better way. Even if this takes longer than doing it the clunky/dumb way. Once you learn the better way, you’ll likely be able to apply that knowledge to other contexts, making you more efficient for the rest of your career.
• When doing mundane tasks that don’t take a lot of thought, challenge yourself to do them faster than the previous time you did them. (Without sacrificing quality or making mistakes.) Make a game out of it.
• Experiment with productivity systems to find what works best for you. GTD, Pomodoro, Deep Work, Make Time, time-blocking, something you read about in a blog post, or something you hack together yourself. There’s no One True Productivity System that’s best for all people, so try out different things.

(Note that the links in the above paragraph are affiliate links.)

Conclusion

That’s six ways to never lose a job and have rapid career growth.

I hope you found this helpful in these difficult times.

Do you have any other strategies for never losing a job, or advancing your career?

Comment below, or follow me on Twitter at @YourselfHelping.