Is Personal Development a Missing Piece for Your Career Growth?
Many people who want to advance their career or shift towards a more fulfilling career path focus on strengthening leadership, management, and communication skills in addition to professional expertise.
Many experts and books provide generic “how-to” lists and approaches offering steps on achieving competencies for these skills. However, “how-to” is only good as a reference point – translating this advice to career value for people is a major challenge. Most of the time, this generic “how-to” advice fails because it does not account for differing learning styles and varying capacities for integrating and applying the learning.
It takes personal development to leveraging these learning to career growth. Self-awareness and self-management enable one to parse out emotional responses from reality, bringing clarity around decision making. Self-confidence empowers one to follow the steps required to move forward and remove or work around dependencies. Empathy allows one to sustain a career growth through building trustful relationships. Self-awareness, self-management, self-confidence, and empathy are fundamental personal development skills required for career growth.
People who are able to apply learning from these “how-to” lists usually are the ones who have done enough personal development work on building their capacity in order to leverage the knowledge. Therefore, professional development must be approached in tandem with personal development.