Five Things that Lead to Professional Growth
Although you want to achieve professional growth, you may be unsure of the right path to attaining it. Professional growth doesn’t necessarily mean getting a promotion or a better job. However, progress sooner or later leads to outward signs of improvement.
Professional growth is, above all, all about feeling better about your work and finding ways of making it more efficient. At the same time, you can also make it more attractive to you. You spend a good part of your life working, so it’s important to feel comfortable with what you do.
“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”
-Pele-
There are many things you can do to experience professional growth. In this article, we’re going to be telling you about five of them. These are specific things you can do if you feel that now’s the time to step your game up.
1. Self-evaluation – One of the paths to professional growth
Self-evaluation is an essential element for knowing where you are as well as where you have to get to in your professional life. Self-evaluate at least once a year. There are no rules or fixed procedures for self-evaluation. That being said, it’s important for you to focus on your good points and bad points.
Experts recommend examining how motivated you are in your professional life and what affects your motivation. They also state that you should discover what your strengths and weaknesses are. It’s particularly important for you to try to identify what’s causing you the most trouble and how you could fix those things.
2. Get more training
Habit and a lack of available time sometimes make you forget about broadening, updating, or deepening your training. This is a huge mistake since knowledge is quickly becoming obsolete nowadays.
That’s why getting additional training broadens your horizons, generates new opportunities, and ultimately makes your job easier. To achieve professional growth, it’s essential for you to complete a course or some other training program at least once a year.
3. Re-engineer processes
The word “re-engineer” seems rather sophisticated, something that can only be done by a specialist. Nevertheless, you can re-engineer aspects of your work. Basically, you need to identify the processes that you’re undertaking and evaluate whether you could simply them or make them more efficient in some way.
Sometimes, this requires a bit of research. What tricks or methods are the people who are doing a similar job to yours using in order to save time and improve their work? Have new technologies come up that might be relevant to what you’re doing? This exercise in research and reflection can lead you to change some of the things you’re doing.
4. Enrich your work environment
It’s very important to feel comfortable in your work environment. That environment includes the physical aspects that surround you as well as all of the people you interact with at work. Thus, it’s worth the effort to think about whether some object or element is making you uncomfortable or otherwise negatively influencing your activities. Are you comfortable enough? Would removing or adding something to your environment make you feel better?
Regarding work relationships, it’s very important to do whatever is necessary to enrich them. That doesn’t mean you have to become best friends with your coworkers. Rather, it involves strengthening the bonds of solidarity and camaraderie you have with them. This will definitely affect your motivation.
5. Have more professional contacts
It’s no secret that many positions are “expendable” these days. Long-term work contracts are the exception rather than the rule. There’s a culture of temporary work in today’s professional world. You always have to be conscious of the fact that your current job position could easily be eliminated, which is why it’s important to keep a strong network of professional contacts.
The best way to find a new job is through personal or professional contacts. Don’t forget this fact. Don’t break ties with your old college classmates or coworkers from past jobs. Also, keep yourself updated on the employment demand in your field. It could someday help you out a lot!
Growing professionally is one way to achieve personal growth. Work helps you boost your self-esteem. Thus, it’s important to value your job and look for paths to improvement. This will turn your job into a constant source of personal development.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Añorga Morales, J. (1999). La educación avanzada: Paradigma educativo alternativo para el mejoramiento profesional y humano de los recursos laborales y de la comunidad. La Habana.