You have your engineering degree and a great job. Your family and hobbies keep you pretty busy. So why should you spend any of your limited time in something like professional development?
As NBC always proclaims, “The More You Know …”
The world marches forward and those who don’t continue to learn get left behind. This is especially true in engineering. Of course, it’s not just the technical skills that you need to work on, you need continual soft skills development, too.
Here are our top 8 reasons for invest your time in professional development.
Developing Your Engineering Skills
- Stay Relevant – Your clients deserve someone with a high degree of skill. People want their doctors staying up with current standards and they expect it of my engineers, too.
- Get Reinvigorated – Stay engaged by learning new things. Learning new methods – sometimes better methods – for accomplishing tasks can be exciting and reinvigorate you.
- Keep Up With the Jones – Everyone else in your field is (or should be) working on theirs. You need to keep up.
- Confidence – Build confidence in yourself. As you do, you’ll build confidence in your clients, too.
Developing Your Soft Skills
- Communication – Whether you’re speaking to a group or just one person across the table from you, communication is the backbone of everything we do. Communicating effectively is an art and a science and one that you can develop.
- Leadership – Leadership isn’t something you simply learn by do. Plus, It’s a lifelong study. If you don’t know what to study, our posts on leadership have a number of suggestions.
- Collaboration – It’s not as simple as “just work together.” Being a good collaborator is a key factor in improving your standing among your peers as well as getting noticed by your boss.
- Time Management – It feels as though we’re all being asked to do more with less and to do it faster. Managing your time is managing your success.
LinkedIn’s Top Skills
Also of note, the four soft skills mentioned above are also four of the top 6 skills that LinkedIn has identified as being the most important workplace learning and development skills to pursue in their 2018 Workplace Learning Report. Those skills, in order, are:
- Communication
- Leadership
- Collaboration
- Role Specific Skills – Yes, your technical skills are the 4th
- Time Management
- Program or Platform Usage
The Final Takeaway
You don’t have to spend hours and hours on this. A little is better than nothing. Find a few minutes to read every day. Watch a TED Talk. Get your company to pay for you to go to a seminar (I know, that’s easier said than done.) And if you’re the manager or leader in your group, make sure your team is investing in themselves, too.
Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash