Personal development is a career-long process and is a way to regularly assess your skills and capabilities, consider your goals and maximise your potential. There are a number of ways in which you can improve your own development in the workplace, such as re-evaluating your time, conducting a skills appraisal, reviewing your transferable skills or overcoming any barriers to acquire a new skill.
1. Commitment to Excellence
Demonstrating a commitment to quality means that you take pride in your work and strive to deliver the best possible results. You should always be looking for opportunities to improve the way you work, generate ideas for streamlining processes and thoroughly check your work. Resilience, determination and innovation are all qualities that you should emphasise if this core competency is required.
Examples include:
Fact-checking your work
Actively seeking new ways of working to improve productivity
2. Mind Mapping and Structured Thinking
In certain careers, employees are required to deploy structured thinking skills and generate ‘mind maps’ (diagrams used to display connections between ideas or concepts). This could be either in a project-based role or a technical capacity. Setting out your ideas and thoughts in a logical pattern using mind maps is an essential skill in these types of roles.
Examples of this competency include:
Using mind maps to display complex information
Communicating specialist technical information clearly and concisely
3. Career Progression
Employers look favourably on employees who are committed to career progression and development. It shows that you are driven, committed and aim to deliver the very best that you can for the business. Career progression may appear in the form of promotions or can be as simple as being assigned more senior duties.
Examples include:
Working to develop existing competencies to a higher level
Actively seeking training opportunities that facilitate progression
Follow