Career Development: Levelling up with the right qualification and experience

An important piece of advice that I received when I started working as a new graduate was about how I needed to continue investing in my personal development if I wanted to be successful in my career. One manager at my first firm went as far as telling me that he spent 10-20% of his income every year in his personal development during his early career. In my case, I didn’t have a fixed monetary amount but every year I made a conscious effort to have some additional personal development goal outside of work. Very often this was in the form of attaining a professional qualification. Before you continue reading, I want to make my view clear, I’m not professing that going out there and collecting degrees and letters after your name is the winning tactic. Ultimately, your success at work will depend on how well you can do the job and communicate your contributions to key stakeholders. What I am saying is that especially in a very rapidly evolving job market like the one we are seeing today, failing to grow your skillsets might not just stop you from getting that promotion but might even be detrimental for your career and job stability as a wide range of jobs become obsolete due to the development of new technologies.

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