You are at work to become a change agent, to positively impact the success of your company by setting goals which are aligned with your company's mission.Don't wait for someone to tell you what to do. Analyze your company carefully, and try to understand what you can do which will make a significant difference. Break down big projects into small, realistic and manageable daily goals and do the same with your career.

Many elements go into making your career a success: planning, preparation, education, strategy and hard work. Some of these elements you have a degree of control over, but others, such as timing and sheer luck, often are not under your control. But regardless of which elements you have worked to build into your career.........those extra night classes or seminars in out of the way places.....or others which have come to you by chance, there are still elements you can add to create more support and serve as an infrastructure for your career success:

Create a Plan and Lay Out Milestones

There are a number of reasons why it is important, particularly for women, to set their own goals and not simply react to the demands or expectations of others. Everyday, hard working women in organizations are "disappeared" partly because they fail to set their own goals.

It is very important for women to realize, they are not at work to be handmaidens or helpers who are easily "disappeared" by devaluing their activities. You are at work to become a change agent, to positively impact the success of your company by setting goals which are aligned with your company's mission.

Don't wait for someone to tell you what to do. Analyze your company carefully, and try to understand what you can do which will make a significant difference. Get a handle on the problem, develop a solution, and a consensus around it, lobby for approval, then execute better and faster than anyone else.

This is accomplished most effectively by breaking down big projects into small, realistic and manageable daily goals. When you focus on your career, think in terms of concrete, realistic steps: gaining experience in a different area by taking on a new assignment; taking short courses or attending seminars in cutting edge topics; improving your performance by 20%; decreasing by 20% the time it takes you to accomplish a task.

From those incremental improvements, you can begin to lay out significant milestones, such as moving from middle to upper management.

Develop an "Advisory Board"

To keep your career going strong and achieving its full potential, you will need a sounding board, someone who can provide you with an objective judgement of how you're performing. This can be a trusted mentor, or a group of professional friends, who are willing to meet with you occasionally and review the milestones you've set for your career.

Frequently, changes take place in an industry or pay scales change, and, if you been putting in long hours, you can miss them or fail to realize their significance or how they can impact your own career. To gain perspective and an objective viewpoint, it's invaluable to be able to turn to trusted advisors.

Take on Public Speaking

It's impossible to overemphasize the value of being a good communicator. What all leaders share is the ability to articulate and communicate their goals with such passion or eloquence that others are motivated to share those goals and join together to achieve them.

Regardless of whether you are an eloquent speaker, you can at least bring interesting news to an audience, in a fresh and organized way. Since most people in a general audience are not as up to date on your field as you are, you should be able to convey something to them which is of interest and which they didn't know before.

If you are able to display a mastery of a subject, and keep your presentation brief and to the point, you will make an impression. And public speaking is one of the best ways to raise your profile in the community and in your professional circle.

Create A Skills Inventory and Continue to Expand

Debra Fields' has her cookie recipe, Martha Stewart has her flair for elegant living, not to mention her financial acumen and driven perfectionism, and you have your own skills, which you must continue to leverage.

Whether your skills are based on your ability with graphics, or your talent for getting an office organized or inspiring people to join your project, you have a set of skills to track and build on. Create your own "portfolio" which identifies and documents those areas you have developed the most and have the greatest competitive advantage in, as measured against your peers, and make its continuous expansion an ongoing priority.

Remember - It's Still About People: Develop A System to Leverage Your Contacts

Take a hard look at how you are networking and make some basic decisons about how to develop a system to make personal contacts and extended networks work better to advance your career

To extract and build on the value of your contact, it is important that you be able to recall the details of your meeting and the specifics of the other person's job and your conversation. Once you have developed a system to tract your contacts, and all your contact information is recorded and organized, then you should develop a system for communicating on a regular basis with people you've met. Communication can be something as simple as sending an email with a web reference or a reminder of an upcoming meeting.

Today, in an intensely competitive global environment, it is important to capture any edge one can. Not only must our career skills constantly be honed, but our relationships must continue to expand and be nourished in order to maximize our odds of achieving success.

Creating a career plan with milestones, gathering support, continuing to expand both our career skills and our networks, if executed faithfully, will lead to success.