Grow with Purpose
As a professional, independently of the industry you are in, you should always keep your skills sharp and keep learning. But starting the habit of self-development and searching for new ways of improving and developing your knowledge can be difficult. At Boardrm, we are your Career Partner for life, therefore we decided to create a list and some tips on how you can keep improving!
The most important tip is to be open to different ways and educational methods of improving your existing skills and developing new ones. We recommend you have a development plan therefore you can identify the skills you want to learn and/or better. After creating your development plan, you will have a list of things you can to improvement which you can follow up thinking how you will achieve those goals.
This is by far the most common way of keeping your skills sharp. Besides the traditional education methods (university for example), there are other ways of getting qualifications. Not only is there a lot of free content in all different topics that can range from creative writing to finance, but there are websites that specialise in short educational courses that will give you a certificate. An example of these are MOOCs (massive open online courses) that are essentially online classes that universities/ educational institutions offer to the public. The cost of these varies depending on the institution but they are typically very low cost or free. A couple of examples of these are Coursera and Get Smart. These courses vary depending on specifics but some of these are as short as 4 hours. Another example of free course platform in LinkedIn with a wide range of short courses in different subjects.
It is a matter of you having a look and seeing if you can find something that suits what you are looking for.
Volunteering can be a very valuable and rewarding experience. By volunteering you can learn a lot. Not only transferable skills that can be applied to most jobs such as work ethic, communication and organisation skills but also industry or role specific knowledge. This depends on your industry and what you are wanting to learn or develop but there are always non-profitable organisation that are willing to have you on board.
Learning from others is the best way to learn. Either you do it at work, through a mentor or even at networking events by having conversations with experts in your industry. The best and most practical knowledge will often come from people close to you so always take advantage of that.
Webinars are a great option if online courses don’t fit your budget or schedule. There is a wide range of webinars both online and offline that you can study to increase your skills. This is a good way of expanding the knowledge you already have in a subject, and a way of developing a new skill. There is always a lot of valuable information you can pick up to maximise your experience and add value to your company.
After you make your development plan, you can start learning from books, websites and even YouTube. Don’t underestimate the power on free online resources as they can proof to be very helpful in filling gaps of knowledge.
We hoped you found this article helpful!
