Through taking the time and initiative to improve your skills through continuing education, you’re improving your chances for a promotion.
Advancing your career means more than just showing up for work. When workers take the time and initiative to improve their skills through continuing education, they’re not only taking charge of their career, they’re also improving their chances for a promotion.
Your needs
Take charge
If you want training to help you get ahead, don’t wait for your boss to suggest it. Take charge and help your boss to get you the training you need.
Appraisals
Realistically appraise yourself on a regular basis. Consider your strengths, as well as your weaknesses. Many people, bosses included, assume that personal development is about addressing weaknesses. But it’s also about leveraging strengths. If you have acknowledged strengths, show your boss how you can take these to the next level.
Be prepared to invest in yourself
Training takes time and effort during, as well as after, the training sessions. Assess whether you are prepared to devote the time and effort to training.
Personal assessment
A 360-feedback personal assessment is one method to diagnose your strengths and development needs. It allows you to seek behavioral feedback from the ‘full circle’ of those you work with – managers, peers, direct reports, customers, etc. Traditionally, most feedback comes only from our manager, yet we spend more of our working time interacting with people other than our boss.
The needs of your boss
Once you understand yourself, you’re ready to focus on the needs of your boss and company so you can demonstrate how your training will be in their best interests. Show the connection between the training experience, acquiring new skills and job success:
Continuously retrain and upgrade staff skills
Because of the present economic climate, bosses are always seeking to boost productivity. Your lasting productive capacity depends on your development after you are hired. For this reason, your boss should plan to continuously retrain and upgrade staff skills.
A training plan
Look for skills required by the company in the near term. Consider what crucial projects are under way or soon to be launched?
As training makes employees more valuable, they feel an increased sense of self-worth and dignity. They gain greater satisfaction from contributing to the achievement of personal, project and corporate goals.
Prioritize
What would add the most immediate, as opposed to long-term, value to you, your boss, the company and its customers? Convert the top priorities into training objectives. For example, your learning objective could be “within one year, I want to be a top-notch negotiator and use it as a way to improve as a buyer for the company.”
Actions and Objectives
Determine an action for each objective, otherwise it will gather dust and go nowhere. For clarity and focus and as an aid to momentum, write your specific actions and time frames. Together with your boss, monitor and measure your success and when you achieve an objective, cross it off your list.
