What is Professional Development?
When you think about it, you never really stop learning. You learn something new every day. The same thing can be said when you start a new job. You learn new processes through training during your first couple months. But learning at work doesn’t stop just because your training has finished.
Having good professional skills – transferrable skills that you can apply to any workplace – is an important asset to have in today’s work environment. Professional development is when you continue your learning and build your skills in the workplace. With professional development, your goal is personal growth – upgrading your skills not just because your company needs you to; but because you want to.
By developing your professional skills, you will have the ability to prepare for major events during your career journey such as: having the readiness to pursue a promotion or being able to successfully change careers.
Skills You Can Develop
Collaboration Skills
Collaboration skills or the ability to work well with others is an important asset that you can apply to any industry and any workplace. Developing this skill will allow you to build better relationships with the people you interact with the most at work – increasing productivity and lowering the chances of conflict.
Organization Skills
Having great organization skills is critical for productivity at work. Utilizing great organization skills can help you focus on your work because there are many things that can distract you from being productive. Things such as us having multiple windows and tabs open on your computer monitor, having a messy or cluttered workspace – organizing your tasks and the things around you can greatly improve your productivity.
Communication Skills
Communication skills are one the most important skills to have in any workplace and are one of the top skills that employers look for in a candidate. Communication skills include verbal communication, written communication, active listening, empathy, etc. Great communication skills go a long way in any workplace because it can help you prevent or manage conflict, collaborate effectively with team members and much more.
Problem Solving Skills
There is no such thing as perfect. When you’re at work, you’re bound to run into problems or issues. Whether it’s affecting you, your team or even your whole company; you need to be able to effectively tackle any problem or issue that appears. Problems arise every now and then and this is why it’s important to learn and develop your problem-solving skills.
By developing key skills you can help ensure that you’re ready for changes that may come up in the future.