Happy National Career Development Month!

Guess what?!

I just found out that November is National Career Development Month! Which is perfect because we’ve decided to focus this blog on personal and career development for the rest of the Fall quarter! How great is that?

(Just to give you a heads up on what’s to come: Winter Quarter will be all about Financial Literacy. In other words, there will be a lot of information on understanding and making informed decisions about money. During Spring Quarter, I’ll be talking a lot about career preparation, including things like writing resumes and cover letters and interview techniques.)

So, let’s celebrate National Career Development Month by talking about the importance of thinking about your own development as a person, along with moving towards a specific career.

I recently found this article by Pamela Dodd and Doug Sondheim, two time management consultants from New York.

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Personal Development and Career Success

To most people, career development means job skill education and training. They think personal development is different and only happens outside work through motivational books and courses, hobbies, travel, spiritual exploration, and other nonwork activities.

But career development and personal development go hand-in-hand. Job skill education and training can only get you so far. You also need to develop attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that lead to success.

Benefits of Personal Development

There are many good reasons to invest in your personal development. The top reasons are:

• More opportunities for challenging work assignments
  and responsibility.
• A clearer path to career advancement.
• Less stress – on you and other people.

There are also many ways to develop yourself. Below are several of the best suggestions:

Personal Development Strategies

1. Identify Your values: People with fuzzy values have fuzzy lives. If you don’t know what’s truly important to you, everything looks like a worthwhile opportunity. Usually, however, you end up traveling down rabbit holes that ultimately lead to nowhere. The only way to get clear on what matters to you is to find out what your values are. You can do some easy exercises that are very enlightening. Suddenly you see yourself.  Just you.  Not the “you” that your family, friends, and coworkers think you should be. Your values are the only personal qualities that will sustain you if you want to go after big things in life.
2. Set concrete goals: Most people have abstract, nonspecific goals. They say, “I want to have an exciting job” or “I want to earn a lot of money.”  But few people accomplish much with these goals because they’re too vague. Only tangible, measurable goals help you set your sights on more specific results. See how the picture changes when you have tangible goals like: “I will employ 10 people and gross 1 million dollars per year at the end of 5 years” or “I will earn 6 figures by the time I’m 30.” Goals crafted this way state the specific results you want by a specific date. They provide a clear target to shoot for. Companies are looking for employees who know how to produce results. You can’t get great results if you don’t have concrete goals and the ability to take action to accomplish them. If you’ve had a lifetime of being vague about your goals, this is an area of personal development you’ll want to focus on.
3. Prioritize: Priorities and goals are related. Your priorities are the things you do to reach your goals. Everything can’t be a priority. Some things are more important than others. You need to figure that out. Author Stephen Covey suggests spending most of your time on what’s important but not urgent. This includes clarifying your values (see #1 above), planning and preparing, building relationships, and doing true re-creation. Others recommend using the ABC system to prioritize your lists. “A” items are high priority. You want to accomplish them every day and fill in with “Bs” and “Cs” when you can.

(Source: http://www.best-of-time-management.com/personal-development.htm)

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As Dodd and Sondheim say, it is really important to consider and determine your own values, interests and abilities both on a professional and a personal level. 

Last week, I attended an AmeriCorps conference in Yakima called SERVES. There were over 1000 people there (all the AmeriCorps member in the state of WA!) and we were able to go to all kinds of training sessions. One of the sessions I attended was all about maintaining a personal sense of creativity and happiness in the workplace. One of the things they had us do was to make a list of all the things that we love to do. After spending a few minutes listing everything we could think of, we shared and were able to talk a bit about how to incorporate those things into our lives on a more regular basis. We discussed the idea that  having more of the things we love to do in our lives would probably make us happier people in general, both at work and at home!

Take a few minutes to write down all of the things that bring you joy in life! You can use that list to help yourself determine a career field that fits you well. (Remember DISCOVER? It’s a great tool for this!)

 
p.s. Want to do something artistic that will help you develop career goals at the same time? Create a poster or write a poem and submit it to the National Career Development Association’s Annual Contest!