Continuous personal and professional development is the key to your future. It can help you become more successful. This article will teach you all about professional development, and most importantly, how to build it from scratch.
What Is Professional Development?
In its simplest form, professional development is a program of training that allows you to improve skills, gain confidence and increase knowledge. Professional development is growth.
Do you know that if you’re not growing, it means you’re stagnating? The world is ever-changing, and if you don’t keep pace, you might be overtaken both in your career and your everyday life.
In today’s work environment, employees are expected to update or at least maintain their skills on a regular basis. What new skill(s) have you learned in the last two years?
Professional development isn’t only for those starting their career or looking for advancements. It is for everyone. Through professional development, you can achieve a successful career regardless of your chosen field.
Professional development can help you take advantage of new opportunities in your department or seek a promotion. It provides a competitive advantage over the competition. Enhancing your skills improves productivity, creates efficiencies, and helps you get noticed. The confidence you gain through professional development can also make you more successful.
The savvy employee is constantly working to enhance performance and maintain or upgrade their skills. It is good for both you and the company.
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Skills Required For Professional Development
At this point, you already have a fair knowledge of what professional development is all about. If not, get your head out of that wineglass and start over from the top. For those paying attention, we will now learn some soft skills that will help you build professional development.
Unlike hard skills, soft skills cannot be measured but they can be proven. Soft skills are important because they are the key to building relationships, gaining a reputation, and creating more opportunities for you to develop your relationships.
Now, we will talk about some crucial soft skills that will likely get you recruited.
Communication
This is the first skill that can take your career to the next level. Both written and verbal communication are very important in the workplace because they help you create a positive image. They improve your chances of building relationships with your coworkers.
Communication skills boost your performance. Whether it’s at your workplace or in your department, or in college, you will boost your performance with effective communication. Employers look for this skill in prospective employees because workers who possess effective communication are more productive because they know how to relate with one another.
If you can clearly express the who, when, what, how, why, and where of a project, you’ll be much in demand.
Now, you might be wondering how to gain this crucial skill. The first thing you can do is join a public speaking workshop, or read some articles on public speaking to learn skills that you’ll apply when speaking in public. Another important skill of communication is to be an active listener. This is very important and often overlooked.
The last skill of effective communication is body language. Develop your ability to communicate verbally. Following these guidelines will improve your overall communication skill.
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Team Work
This is another crucial skill that takes your career to the next level. You need teamwork because no man is an island. You need help on that particular work project to make it successful. When employers are hiring, they look for the traits of teamwork in an individual.
Teamwork involves people coming together to carry out a specific goal. Good teamwork spirit improves the culture of the office and it improves the office environment. You gain the skill of teamwork by constantly lending a hand to a colleague in need (which could become a favor owed). You also gain the spirit of teamwork by taking responsibility for your actions, whatever those actions are.
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Adaptability
Another crucial skill needed to advance your career and build professional development is adaptability. Adaptability, if not clear from the word itself, simply means the ability to adapt. It means being flexible.
You need to learn flexibility because things don’t always go as planned. And this can become really frustrating especially when you have a rigid schedule. But rather than complaining or grumbling about it, good professionals find solutions to problems instead of increasing the problem.
Employers really cherish this skill because they fundamentally know that not only is change constant but it is also fast. If they are not careful, they might get left behind and nobody wants that.
The best way to gain this adaptability skill is by simply leaving your comfort zone and trying new things. Doing this will display you’re quick to learn and flexible to new changes.
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Problem-Solving
The reason you need this skill is that when something goes wrong, you can either complain about it or take action. And of course, it’s taking action that will get you noticed. So knowing how to think on your feet means thinking of quick solutions or the act of making decisions quickly.
This is a very important skill when it comes to being an important part of an organization. Employers look for this skill because companies face problems every day and they need solvers. These solvers help them scale through unexpected challenges. The best way to gain this skill is to always approach your boss with a solution, not a problem. This is how you become a problem solver. A fixer.
So when an issue arrives, sit down and think about how you’re going to solve it before bringing it to your boss’s attention. Even if you are not able to fully solve the crisis, they will appreciate your efforts and it will improve your career.
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Critical Thinking
The final skill I wish to give you on building professional development is critical thinking.
Why do I need this skill? Well, if you have a problem with thinking, you shouldn’t have started reading this post. Critical thinking is a very valuable skill in the workspace. It involves you considering both the positive and negative sides of every idea. This helps you be a better problem solver. This skill will make you successful no matter what your job is.
How to develop your critical thinking?
The only way to develop it is by learning. You could read the news every day. You could read books. You could discuss non-work issues with your friends and family. The point of doing it is to generate new ideas. When you discuss problems with others, you’re able to brainstorm new ideas and this will help your critical thinking processes.
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A Word From Battabox On Professional Development
This wraps up our session. Today you have learned the top skills that can take your career to the next level. Endeavor to utilize and imbibe these skills I have shown you to begin your journey to professional development.
If you have any questions, let us know below.
