4 Ways Listening to Music Boosts Your Career
Would that it were so! But of course, listening to music isn’t going to make any magical career transformations happen. What listening to music can do, however, is improve your performance and productivity in specific ways (as another Recruiter.com writer has pointed out in the past ). To show you just what I mean, here are four ways that simply listening to music could boost your career:
1. Music Can Make You More Confident During Interviews
Research conducted by a team of business professors from various schools, including INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management, shows that feelings of power lead to better performance in interview situations. Therefore, if you can improve your confidence going into and interview, you can improve your performance. This is where music has a part to play: the research found that listening to specific types of music can improve confidence. The professors behind the study created a “high-power” playlist of base-heavy songs that managed to create feelings of power, dominance, and determination in listeners. They also created a low-power playlist. The researchers found that those who who listened to the base-heavy, high-power songs were more likely to want to go first in a debate (34 percent) than those who listened to the low-power playlist (20 percent).
The researchers concluded that listening to high-power music prior to an interview can boost performance in interviews by boosting confidence.
2. Music Can Make You More Productive, Accurate, and Creative
A study by Teresa Lesiuk from the University of Windsor looked at the effects of listening to music on software developers. Lesiuk found that workers who were listening to music while working completed their work faster and at a higher quality than those who did not listen to any music while working. Workers who listened to music also noted that they were more positive and felt more creative.
And what music did people listen to in order to achieve these results? They simply listened to songs they liked.
3. Music Can Improve Your Attention to Detail
If you work a job in which you deal with numbers — or any role that requires a lot of attention to detail, really — then you can improve your performance by listening to classical music. A study conducted by Mindlab International on behalf of MusicWorks found workers could increase their accuracy by 12 percent by listening to classical music.
4. Music Can Help You Hit Your Deadlines and Perform Better at Data Entry
Are you looking to work your way up from from a ground-level data-entry role? Then you should listen to pop music, as doing so can boost your performance by a massive 58 percent, according to the Mindlab study mentioned above. With such a heightened performance level, you will certainly get yourself noticed and increase your chances of promotion. Pop music also helps you to complete your work tasks faster in general, making you more effective at meeting deadlines.
As you can see, listening to appropriate music when doing certain tasks will increase your overall performance and effectiveness at work dramatically, which improves your career prospects. I’d love to hear what music you listen to at work to help boost your productivity or effectiveness!