What exactly are you going to spend your time on? Find out if any of your peer networks have interest in this topic. Having people to talk to and collaborate with while you learn is a fantastic value-add! Calendaring is caring. Anyone who has taken my training courses on time management and communication knows my creed: if you care about it, put it on your calendar. In Corporate America, things are swept away unless you protect some time for it.
Your self-development should never be an afterthought! Be disciplined. Create the plan, work the plan and hone the plan. Your returns entirely depend on the effort you put in. Make sure your boss knows what you are up to. Apply these steps any time you need them. Be your own best developmental resource for the rest of your career! Here are some tips on how you can create and employ your own professional developmental plan: 1.
Example 2: I will reach out to Tom in Finance whose career I admire and ask for his confidentiality in talking about my development on this topic. What experiences does he think I should seek out to improve my skill set? Example 3: I will set up online alerts or aggregators feedly is a great tool to automate the collection of blogs and publications on this topic.
I will read feedly every morning while on the subway going to work. At this stage, you are ready to do a gap analysis, which determines where you are now and where you aim to be. Complete a gap analysis by doing the following:. Taking the goals that you outlined as your two-year or five-year career focus, find job listings for the type of job you want.
Be sure the descriptions match your skills and experience, and the requirements align with your ultimate ambition. Additionally, take time to consult with your supervisor, mentor and colleagues at work to understand whether there are key items that you should add to the list.
While you may not want to tell your supervisor if your goal is to land a better-paying job at another company, you can still articulate to them the specific skills you would like to bring to your current role. Since this kind of professional development would benefit your team and the company as well as you as an individual, your boss will likely be pleased to help connect you to resources or assign you relevant responsibilities.
Create a simple rating system of , with 1 representing no match between you and the requirement, and 5 meaning that you perfectly meet the requirement. With this system, the lower the rating, the more time and energy you will need to invest in improvement. Once you have completed this exercise, identify all of the areas where you have a development gap. Look for common skills and experiences and put them together in a group. You will likely begin to notice patterns in which skills or experiences you have a solid background in and which ones require further development.
See if there are items that need to happen in a particular sequence. For example, before you take on extra responsibilities at work related to a specific piece of software, you will need to learn how to use it. This is the list of skills, education and experience you need to focus on. This step involves taking the list of skills, education and experiences you want to gain over the next few years and creating a concrete plan to get to your career goals.
Here's what to do:. Create a set of tasks related to each item on the list that will help you to achieve them. For example, if one of the skills you want to learn is how to use a particular piece of software, your plan could include signing up for a course to learn about it, practicing with a colleague and asking your supervisor to allow you to work with the software as part of your role. Order the plan like a timeline according to the logical trajectory for your goals.
Designing your goals following the SMART template helps ensure that your goals are tangible and achievable in pre-set increments of time. The best way to keep yourself accountable to the plan is to assign yourself dates for each task.
Make sure to plan out any preliminary steps to each item too. For example, before you enroll in a professional development course, you may need to apply and purchase the required textbooks. At this stage, you have a career development plan. The implementation stage now begins with the following steps:.
To keep yourself accountable, keep track of how your actual implementation aligns with the dates you assigned yourself in step four. Check-in with the list at least two times per year to make sure that you continue to achieve the set timeline. A positive performance review, landing a new job, getting a promotion, establishing useful career contacts or winning an award could be metrics for career success.
Unexpected occurrences and events will arise. A job opportunity could take your career in a surprising direction, or you could move across the country. A wide variety of factors could knock your plan off course. The plan is not concrete, and it is useful to review it periodically to update your goals to match your life circumstances.
In addition to regularly tracking your progress, plan to re-evaluate the plan itself every six months or so, and adjust it to meet your current goals. Whether you just graduated from college or you have been in the workforce for years, a career development plan can be an important tool to advance your goals. Mapping out your future career will not only help you to reach your career goals, but will also help you to stay motivated and inspired at work, increase your productivity, and strengthen your relationship with mentors and supervisors.
Stay on top of your plan, and chances are you will be able to take your career to the next level. Find jobs. Company reviews.
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