Get yourself connected
If you haven’t already, join LinkedIn, the leading online social networking platform for professionals looking to keep up-to-date with what’s happening in their industries and to connect with each other. It’s easy and free to set up an account, and the more you use it the more you’ll attract attention from people who could be future employers or clients. If you really want to impress, consider setting up a website that focuses on the professional side of your life (this is also easy and free to do, with WordPress). You can showcase projects you’ve worked on and use a blog to highlight your expertise and knowledge.

Goal!
It’s easy to spend time daydreaming about your career promotion and all the things you’ll buy with the pay rise that goes with it – but make sure those dreams act as motivation to achieve something real rather than as an easy alternative to making proper changes. Take time to think about where you’d like to be in a year’s time, in five years’ time, and in ten years’ time, and use the list of goals you come up with to help build a truly workable plan for progress.

Time to skill up
If you’ve discovered that the next level up in your profession requires skills and knowledge you don’t have, there’s no need to panic – it could be a blessing in disguise. Taking a relevant course will help refresh your mind and reinvigorate your love for your job, as well as earn you respect at work and show that you have the get-up-and-go required for potential promotion. If your organisation has a policy of funding education for employees – beyond obligatory health and safety courses – you might even find they can pay for your training.

Find a mentor
If you have someone in your life that you admire, who has achieved some or maybe all of the things you too would like to achieve, it’s time to adopt them as a mentor. Take them out to lunch and ask if they wouldn’t mind giving you some career advice, telling you about the mistakes they made and – perhaps – letting you bounce some ideas off them from time to time.

Befriend your boss
If you and your boss don’t get on at all, it’s definitely something to bear in mind when going for a promotion: in other words, you might not stand a chance of getting it. However, if your boss is a friend, or at least a warm acquaintance, then it’s a good idea to approach them with your plans for advancement. If they are leaving or have been promoted, then they can give you a full and rounded picture of what their old job entails if you want to apply for it, and if you want to move sideways and up, then they can fill you in on what’s expected in terms of management, responsibility and workload at that level.

Think about your team
If there’s a vacancy left by a departing boss, it’s odds-on that you won’t be the only one in your department looking to fill it – dealing with being a gracious victor or a decent loser is certainly something to consider. You also need to be very honest with yourself about a potential change from team-mate to manager: will your old peers respect you? Will you feel comfortable telling them to do things? Will you deal firmly and quickly with problematic behaviour? If the answer to any of these is ‘no’, you’re on shaky ground.

Dress the part
Finally, don’t underestimate the power of ‘smart’. Even if your workplace operates a relaxed dress code and you enjoy stretching that description to the max, brushing your hair and/or beard and slipping into a jacket will do you no harm at all. Even if your intelligence and ability are off the scale, if you spend meetings surreptitiously scraping egg yolk off your ‘What Would Spock Do?’ t-shirt, management will notice, and almost certainly place you in the ‘not one of us’ box…