Leadership Skills

Your Professional Development Plan

Professional development allows you to maintain or upgrade your knowledge and skills. Generally professional development plans relate to your career or job, but they may also contain personal skill development or knowledge enrichment.

Your plan should be unique and customized towards your needs and interests because only you know your talents and your interests. Some professionals, such as accounting, health care, and K-12 require on-going professional developing to maintain credentials.

Types of Professional Development

• Maintenance of knowledge or skills
  • software or technology updates
  • federal, state, or local laws and regulations changes
  • marketplace changes or new trends
• Increase or expand knowledge or skills
  • foreign languages
  • technologies
  • courses within your career field

Steps Involved in Developing a Professional Development Plan

Your professional development plan should be a work in progress, so do not think that you must create the ultimate plan and then finish it. As you learn new skills and the workplace changes, your plan may also need some modifications. Once you have a plan, it will be much easier to maintain it.

To develop your plan, here are the steps needed:

• Self-assessment: What knowledge and skills do you have now, and what would you like to know or learn?
• Career and industry assessment: What knowledge and skills are currently needed, and are there any projections about change?
• Identify training and learning opportunities: Where and how could you gain knowledge and skills?
• Create a portfolio: How will you demonstrate your knowledge and skills?
• Evaluate your progress: This is cyclical, so keep working at it.