Your Professional Growth Plan

UBIS – Tips & Tricks to help on your Professional Journey

Professional Growth Plan – to stay competitive in today’s job market you need to focus on your professional journey.  It is important to always be seeking ways to develop professionally.  Those who invest in personal and professional development often benefit from new advancement opportunities.  This includes higher salaries and increased overall career satisfaction.  In this blog, we want to help you understand what professional growth is.  Then provide steps for development.   All to help you on your professional journey!

So, what is Professional Growth?

Professional growth essentially refers to gaining new skills and work experience.  These can help you reach a goal in your career.  Since the job market is ever-changing, keep yourself up to date with trends.  This will give you a better chance to distinguish yourself among others for years to come.

Technologies and the world, in general, are advancing so fast.  The only way to keep up the pace is if you continually develop yourself both on a professional and personal level.  To make you more resilient in the job market, we’ll have a look at all of the straight-to-the-point steps you need to cover while you’re planning your professional growth.

Creating Your Plan

A Professional Growth Plan (PGP) is a list of actionable steps for achieving your career goals.  It also helps you gain specific insight into how you can reach your career aspirations.  Aspirations can include earning a new certification or finding advice within your university. Drafting a PGP is helpful during a job search.  By defining your goals, you can have a true understanding of how you want to navigate the search and interview process.

Follow these five steps to create a simple, thorough professional growth plan:

1. Self-Assessment: A self-assessment is an evaluation of your professional interests, knowledge, and skills. Creating a self-assessment allows you to examine your current position as it relates to your career goals. When you determine the skills and interests you currently possess, you can identify areas to improve.  It can be helpful to identify your transferable skills. Transferable skills are marketable personal assets that many employers seek in candidates.  Examples are good communication, teamwork, or leadership.  They can also be a list of software applications or computer programs you are proficient with.
2. Goals: The goals you set in your professional development plan should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely). Using SMART goals will make them trackable. This makes it easier to update your PGP when you complete important milestones.  Structure your goals in a way that makes it easy to achieve them by completing small steps.
3. Strategies: Your professional growth plan strategies define how you will achieve your goals. You should list a variety of approaches.  These should include experiential learning (learning through doing), exposure (learning from others), education and reflection.  As a general rule, the majority of your strategies should be experiential.  This will give you a valuable hands-on experience when developing new skills.
4. Resources: Resources are places where you can find professional growth. They might provide workshops or networking opportunities.  They have the potential to enhance your career path greatly.  At UBIS, we have a wide variety of resources that can help you in your professional growth.  Programs like JobTeaser and Cengage where students can find valuable information, tips, mentoring.  Even open positions in the field of work.  Likewise, you can always count on the help of your teachers and other resources.  Our alumni group on LinkedIn is where we share new career opportunities and networking opportunities.  Click here to join the group!
5. Timelines: Your professional growth plan should always be a work in progress.  It should grow and change over time and reflect where you currently stand in your professional life.  Some good times to update your professional growth plan are when reaching milestones, updating strategies, or changing goals.

Remember that the first step to professional growth is to anchor yourself in a central goal.  From there, reverse engineer the process and guide your entire learning process towards it.  Always look at future market demands, both local and international.  Finally, take time to go through each step and enjoy the ride!