How can you develop your skills as effectively as possible? Why even learn new things?
The right expertise is vital for an organization, and developing expertise is the key to success. On challenging markets, competition is constantly tightening, and it is no wonder that strong and diverse expertise makes organizations more agile in overcoming various challenges.
The same applies to individuals – to you yourself. To do the work in your field, you need a certain kind of expertise. By developing it further and more diversely, you will stand out positively at your workplace or, for example, from a large crowd of job seekers. When expertise covers a wide range of skills from your field as well as around it – such as up-to-date digital skills and work-life skills – the challenges that come your way become easier to solve.
How can you develop your skills in a way that suits you? Ask yourself five important questions, and you will find a clearer direction for developing your skills.
1. What goals do I have, and what do I want to achieve in my work?
Before you can start developing your skills in a focused way, you also need to know what you want to achieve. Is your goal to
🔸strengthen your current skills?
🔸acquire new knowledge?
🔸develop in a specific new area?
🔸...or something else?
Starting and advancing the development process is made easier by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable parts if the main goal feels vague.
If your long-term goal is to be, for example, a more approachable supervisor, start with small pieces: "go through a specific supervisor training," "start weekly exchange of news meetings with team members," or "ask for feedback once a month."
2. What is my preferred way to learn new things, and what, on the other hand, does not motivate me?
Learning new things doesn't always have to mean participating in a course or coaching program (although they are very effective and functional ways to develop expertise!) – learning can happen in countless different ways, the most important of which is to find the most enjoyable for yourself. Forced learning often strangely stalls from the start.
Do new things stay in your mind best when you listen to a podcast? Does going through a training package feel easier when you can divide it into small parts and use a little time for learning often instead of handling everything at once – or vice versa?
3. What is the best time for me to learn something new?
Similarly, to choosing the right way of learning, often finding the right time is best done by trying. The biggest problem for many is finding time for learning from a busy schedule, and when your own goals do not progress, tackling the challenge only becomes more difficult.
Therefore, it is worth reserving a small chunk of time for learning at regular intervals from the calendar, for example, 15 minutes every Friday. A quarter of an hour doesn't sound like much, but as a routine, learning time quickly accumulates hours. Perhaps learning something new is a good way for oneself to start or end the work week?
4. How can I apply what I have learned in practice?
Developing expertise is not just about collecting new information, but naturally also about applying it in practice. And it also holds true that you learn by doing: practical training and utilizing skills strengthens what you have learned and helps make theory a part of everyday life.
When you learn new skills, also think about the situations in which you can use your expertise. There are very likely many other situations than the most obvious opportunities.
If you have learned, for example, to use artificial intelligence to produce text, maybe you can use the logic you learned for other needs, such as editing pictures or creating various plans.
5. What is a working method for me to evaluate my success?
Regular self-assessment is an important part of skill development, but it too can be done in many different ways.
Listing new skills and writing a school grade afterward hardly works as an effective tool for self-reflection (but if it works for you, go for it!), but the evaluation of development can also be related to the way of learning and goals. For evaluation, you could consider, for example:
🔸feedback requested from colleagues or supervisors and reflecting it on your own thoughts
🔸successful application of a new skill in a work situation
🔸faster or smoother completion of certain tasks thanks to the new knowledge.