Continuing professional development helps you maintain knowledge and skills in a rapidly changing environment. Whether it is learning new technical skills or keeping in touch with trends that will affect your clients, professional development is a life-long process.
“Knowledge can be acquired and skill-sets developed anywhere – learning
is unavoidable and happens all the time. However, lifelong learning is
about creating and maintaining a positive attitude to learning both
for personal and professional development. Lifelong learners are motivated
to learn and develop because they want to: it is a deliberate and voluntary act.”
Providing professional development opportunities to employees demonstrates their value to the company. Professional development promotes the acquisition of new skills, exposure to new ideas and can increase employee morale and productivity.
Ron Carucci argues that self-improvement, in all actuality should be a group activity. “Despite our common cultural notion of ‘self’ improvement, the most successful efforts to self-improve have other people at their core.”
Carucci discusses five ways to build a self-improvement team that will help you to develop new professional habits or break old ones.
- Do an informal, monthly 360-degree review.
- Create accountability for change.
- Join others on similar journeys.
- Create a laboratory to practice in.
- If you hire a coach, make sure it’s the right one.
At Access/Information, the need to constantly educate myself has directly contributed to the cultivation of a unique methodology that allows me to assist others through actionable data to strategically grow their business.
What are you doing to create professional development opportunities for yourself and your employees?