Improving your skills can drive professional growth and help you achieve the goals that you set out for yourself. It’ll help you reach new heights and boost your career prospects.
With the ever-changing world we live in, professional development is key to keeping up with the trends that shape our industries and grow with them.
In this article, we help you find ways to take your career to the next level with upskilling efforts.
Importance of career and succession planning
Planning out your career moves is one of the key factors of professional growth. This is how you can identify where you need to improve yourself and how you can go about doing so.
As a professional person, there are two options that are available to you. Succession Planning and Career Planning. Although they are similar in nature, there is one fundamental difference between them - who is the one devising the plans.
Succession planning is spearheaded by companies to facilitate the professional growth of their employees. It is to make sure that when an integral member of the team retires, is promoted or leaves, the successors to the role are adequately prepared to take on the new position.
Career planning, on the other hand, is undertaken by the individual to aid their own professional growth. This can be facilitated by the company they are working with, but ultimately the employee’s plans may or may not include growth within the company itself.
Upskilling versus Reskilling
When you are working on your professional development, you also need to understand the key differences between upskilling and reskilling yourself. Reskilling prepares employees to take on a job that is similar in nature to their current role, while upskilling is honing their skills for the same job.
In short, people who undergo reskilling have an adjacent skill set—skills that consist of knowledge that can be used and applied in the role they want to fill. To sharpen their skills and align them with the correct path, there is a small shift in career paths.
An example of reskilling would be a journalist undergoing an SEO course to become a content writer for a marketing agency.
What is business development?
In short business development is putting ideas into action for the positive progress of a business. It is a role that requires creativity backed up by an analytical mind as you will need to make strategic decisions, build partnerships, and find suitable ways to drive business growth.
The benefits of business development upskilling
We know that upskilling offers you an opportunity for professional development, but in the sector of business development, what sort of benefits await you?
You will gain an all-around knowledge about what business offers, as well as several possible career paths you can branch off into. Business courses allow you to learn about operations, sales, marketing, and human resources.
It will provide you with the tools to think critically, apply an analytical approach to problem-solving, and learn how to make tough decisions in a pinch. Most importantly, it will help you develop the resilience required to lead an enterprise on your own if need be.
Some other benefits include boosting your personal network and meeting people who can become integral liaisons in the future. In addition to this, it will increase your employability rate and potential.
In your current role, it will aid with job satisfaction, help boost productivity, and provide you with tools to help ensure future stability.
Important Considerations
- When you are taking on this learning opportunity, you need to make sure that you are interested in the field, not just what you can benefit from it.
- If you are undertaking your professional development on your own, you need to take your budget into account. There are plenty of affordable Master’s degrees that will suit your budget.
- Depending on the time and goals you set for yourself, there are accelerated degree options that you can choose to use.
Career options if you focus on business development
Business development can be a designated career path, but if you choose to undergo an all-round business course, these are some of the career paths that you can follow
- Sales and sales management: A business development degree will help you predict and analyze sales opportunities with more efficiency
- Marketing: strategic thinking and creativity will come into play.
- Operations and management: It will help you lead projects and navigate all the factors required to ensure the success of the project.
- Own businesses: With these skills, you will be able to start your own business as a side project, invest in a startup, or even build your own investment portfolio.
Skills and options available
When you plan to upskill, these are the possible routes you can choose. You can use multiple in conjunction with each other.
- Mentorship or coaching: You can ask to shadow a colleague or a high-ranking member of your business network. Mentors provide hands-on experience and provide guidance to help you succeed.
- Attend workshops and conferences: These take place several times a year. Not only is it beneficial knowledge to acquire, but you will be able to expand your business network with the people you meet at these events.
- Courses and online workshops: These will provide you with the theoretical knowledge that you will need. They will also provide you with certification afterwards.
- Further education: If you have a qualification and want to expand on it, there are options for a one-year master's program online that will aid this.
- Microlearning: These are shorter training modules that work in conjunction with a busy lifestyle.
How to start upskilling
When you are ready to start on your developmental journey, this is a good way to go about it:
- Keep up with industry trends: Join forums and groups to help keep abreast with new technologies and changes in the industry. This will help you find a suitable direction to move in.
- Skills gap analysis: With this, you will be able to see where you are lacking and where you need to focus your efforts.
- Set goals: This will help provide motivation and a focal point for your efforts. With goals, you will be able to create a structure for your learning process.
- Prioritize tasks: Assess your workload and use tools to help plan and keep you on track to achieve your goals.
- Schedule meetings with higher-ups: If your workplace has succession and career planning programs, you can set up meetings with higher-ups on how you would like to move forward in your career and ways they can facilitate this. Try to suggest options that are suitable and beneficial for the whole team.
- Work-life balance: Remember to maintain your work-life balance to mitigate burnout and stress from your workload and skills development endeavors.
The bottom line
Business development is a skill that will allow you to branch out into many other related fields or help you start a business of your own. If you are looking to further your career, then upskilling yourself is the way to go. This is a beneficial practice where you undergo learning and development to help get you on par with the skills required to do the job that you want to pursue.
