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I am a young professional and want to improve my earning power, learning, job promotion chances or identifying a new exciting career goal and begin saving and investing personal finances for future use. My current job feels like a dead end with little satisfaction and long, irregular working hours including weekends.

Hey I just posted this article on my blog last night — 10 career tips for young professionals. I think it will help…

1. People go, the relationships stay. This one is simple: the momentum of a long term partnership carries more force than a single individual. This goes both ways. If you are a new acccount manager with changes in mind, be patient. If you plan on abusing your leverage as a client, or you are a vendor and want to haze the new client, be warned. Your counterpart can have you removed from the account on a whim. Why? Because the relationship is more important than you.

2. When emailing, practice the good news sandwich. One quality I don’t normally associate with email is grace. To be graceful in business may have connotations of weakness, or worse, passive aggressiveness. However a truly graceful email gives the courtesy of introduction and consideration, delivers a bit of bad news in the middle and exits with reminder of good faith and potential upside that may come in the future.

3. Use silence in negotiation (particularly the beginning). When possible, let the other party speak first in negotiation. I’m not talking about who says "hello" first. I am referring to the numbers part. Learn to wait, and artfully pause after a price quote, and you’ll find yourself in a much better situation than if you spouted off the first number that comes to you.

4. Talk about others as if they are standing next to you. Do this and you’ll sleep like a baby. Recognize it in others and give them your trust. Engaging in gossip is about as thrilling as the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line. It’s OK to read once in a while, just don’t subscribe to them.

5. Managers clean up messes. This is a big one, because there is a long line of management jobs between you and the CEO. Odds are, you’ll be a manager until you *gulp* retire. Not all of us get promoted to the big golf course in the sky after 10 years of service. Nope, we get promoted to another level of middle management. This is reality, and if you negotiate accordingly you’ll continue to scale your compensation. What most people don’t realize is the higher up you go in management, the bigger the messes you will be expected to clean up.

6. Always make it personal. And don’t be fake. Life is too short to pick up the phone at work and pretend to care. Do you best to get to know the person on the other end of the line, email or lunch table. Relationship building will pay dividends in conjunction with hard work. Be the buddy who gets nothing done and this will blow up in your face.

7. Never kiss up and kick down. This one is harder than most people will admit. However, it is crucial in any vertical organization to be respectful of people who hold positions above and below you. It’s counterintuitive to seek anything but number one, but your superiors will notice that you work well with others. Remember it’s much better to be talked about in a positive light than talking yourself up in front of others, above or below you.

8. Under promise, over deliver — but don’t sandbag. Being conservative is good, but we’re all in it to succeed. This is America right? Aren’t we all entitled to be Rockefeller’s if we put our minds to it? Wrong. Shoot for the moon, but don’t promise pictures before you get there. At the same time, they hired you to try your best and that means really trying. Sandbag your numbers/goals and it will become clear early on that you don’t have the capacity to self manage.

9. Learn to say no. Unless you work with a company of 10 people or smaller (and I have), learn to prioritize. If you have too many "high priority" items, either re-prioritize, request that a few items get moved off your plate, or flat out say "I don’t have the time." Everything with your name on it is expected to be of good quality. Take on too much and two things happen: you get known as the workhorse and overall quality of output goes down.

10. Be honest. If you don’t know, say so. Delivering luke warm news for weeks or months instead of catching a load a bricks in one shot is a huge mistake. This goes for clients, vendors and managers. In the end, the recipient of the bad news you’ve been harboring will thank you for hearing the news sooner than later.