How to find career success in 2025, from a professor and author

More than half, 56% of workers are looking for a new job or plan to in 2025, according to an October 2024 Resume Templates survey of 1,258 full-time U.S. workers. One in three of them plan to quit their current job even if they don’t have another lined up.

Whatever your career plans are for 2025 — whether you’re looking for a new gig, hoping to get a promotion or simply looking to get better at your current position — there are steps you can take now to make progress.

Here are three tips from professor of organizational psychology and author of “Likeable Badass” Alison Fragale about how to set yourself up for success in 2025.

To begin with, start identifying what you’d like to accomplish in the new year — or even a few years down the line.

“We want to look forward into the future to a point that is an achievement we want to have,” says Fragale, adding that it can be that “you’ve created a product, or you’ve started a mentoring program,” for example. Whatever you want to be able to put on your resume or you’d be proud of.

Then, you want to work backwards from there and come up with some actionable steps on how to do it. In 2025, those steps will help you make choices when looking at your to-do list, says Fragale. “When everything can’t be done, which of these things is going to most push me forward to those goals?”

Once you’ve figured out what you’d like to achieve, identify “three to five relationships for helping you achieve that goal,” Fragale says. These can be people who’ve built similar products or who’ve held the position you want to reach, whoever you think can help you make that progress.

Then “start thinking about how you can add value to their life in 2025,” she says. Can you help them with a project they’re working on? Can you make a beneficial introduction? Can you share some new research that’s pertinent to their work? Helping them first can build your relationship into something more substantial that can be reciprocated.

Try to touch base with them twice a year to keep up those relationships. That way if and when they can finally help you, you will have established that connection and have a natural opening to ask.

Finally, get “comfortable talking about your wins,” says Fragale.  

That could mean sending an email telling your boss some of the things you achieved this week or that your team accomplished. It could mean coming up with a good way to answer the question “how’s work?” in your personal life that highlights one or two things you’ve done well.

If your success happens “behind closed doors,” says Fragale, “no one knows about it,” and you can’t reap the benefits.

Simply by knowing how to showcase her wins, Fragale has met “some of the people who have become most meaningful to me professionally” at places like “an airport bar, my child’s birthday party.”

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