If you’re a Singaporean work professional, you may be spending too much time on managing your career. According to research by IPSOS Mori and Catalyst involving 3,200 working professionals globally, including 400 in Singapore, 81-percent of Singaporean professionals believe that the ideal amount of time spent on progressing your career should be in excess of 30 minutes in a day.
Another interesting snippet that emerged from the survey: given an hour, 95-percent if Singaporeans believe it’s more useful to spend time keeping in with the boss (by making them tea) than spending time building their network or finessing their CV. Also revealed was a gender divide with 42-percent of the population who think that men are better than women at networking, versus only 9-percent believing women were better.
Check out the infographic below:
But for personal branding expert William Arruda, 9 minutes a day is sufficient to maintain a healthy and successful career. “Fitting 9 minutes of career management into your daily schedule is all it takes without adding stress or pressure,” advises Arruda. “9 minutes is the optimum amount of time recommended, because it also gives you complete focus, and educators to psychologists agree that the ability to focus one’s attention on a task is crucial for the achievement of one’s goals.” Arruda, who partnered with professional online social network LinkedIn to identify the optimum amount of time to spend daily on what he has termed ‘continuous career management’, adds that building and maintaining relationships is a major component of successful career management.
“These days, we live in a highly connected and technology driven world, so building your online network on LinkedIn, is a critical career management skill,” he says.
Here are some LinkedIn tips from Arruda on how to put those 9 minutes to good use:
1. Build your network. Building and maintaining relationships are a major component of a successful career.
2. Maintain relationships by recommending and congratulating others in their careers – everyone enjoys being recognized and LinkedIn provides an easy way to do this.
3. Request recommendations from your network as credibility is critical.
4. Document achievements and wins on your LinkedIn profile to stay current and relevant.
5. Update your status every day and make sure your profile and photo is current.
6. Expand on your thought leadership; lead a forum or LinkedIn group; publish an article; start a blog; speak publicly or recommend books on the Amazon LinkedIn app.
7. Use the power of video and create a video bio of yourself for your LinkedIn profile.
8. Source staff – one of a manager’s hardest jobs. If you build your brand community, you’ll create fans who want to work for you.
9. Research – Make an effort to get to know more about your clients or partners and competitors. LinkedIn is a great place to start.
