Your Development Planner
Early career
In your early career the focus is on building your skills and experiencing a range of tasks and activities to give you a well rounded view on where your career path will take you. At this time you are also working hard to prove that you have all the skills needed to do your job and that you are working to develop additional skills to take you to the next level of employment. Skills training, with extensive feedback on your work in a wide range of areas is required at this stage.
Mid Career
By the middle of your career you will be developing specialist skills in areas that interest you and you are good at. You will also be deciding whether you want to remain in a specialist area and work on many projects in your area of expertise, or whether you want to climb the ladder further and move into management. At this stage you need higher level training which includes examples of the best work in your area of expertise so that you can benchmark yourself to other specialists and identify any further training that you need to be the best at your craft.
At this stage your learning can be self directed, as well as delivered via classes, so online learning may be suitable for you. You will also need to talk to mentors for their opinions on whether you have the potential for management roles. To decide whether you are suited for management you can also read books and articles, attend conferences and networking events and watch and listen to management talks to understand what is required in management.
Senior Career
In the senior stage of your career you should have a range of specialist skills under your belt, but you must also understand the skills of all your team members, whether it is your own area of expertise or not. Modern management requires active engagement with all the technical areas in your control and continual updating of your knowledge of evolving technologies. Managers also need strategic thinking and planning skills, advanced people skills, financial ability, detailed knowledge of how your organisation works, business skills and the ability to work collaboratively with senior colleagues.
To reach this stage in your career you must overlay human resource, financial and administrative skills over your craft skills, and actively move your thinking to a point where you know achieve more by leading your team than from doing the task yourself. At this stage you must acquire management craft skills such as budgeting, administration and people skills from external management courses, internal management programs and train the trainer courses.
Where will your career take you?
Check our course page to see the current list of available courses.