How to Improve my Professional Skills - Ultimate Guide.
How do I improve my professional skills? - is a crucial question that runs in everyone's mind at different stages of professional growth. Some professionals who are good in managing time, listening, and I disciplined working in a professional environment improve their skills and capabilities faster to stay ahead of the competition.
In reality, every professional has different skills and will encounter varying levels of success. Creating a simple and effective professional ecosystem to learn and improve your professional soft skills is the key to success. In this article, we describe in detail the strategies and ways to improve your professional skills faster. Also, learn about professional credibility ratings and how to build it here.
Key Points
- Identify your professional ecosystem.
2. Assess and baseline your present state
3. Rate your feedback
4. getCREDIBLE platform for continuous feedback and improvement
5. Get objective feedback on improving skills.
6. A learning plan with a mentor
7. Career growth with your improved skills
Identify your professional ecosystem
The first and foremost step in improving your professional skills is to identify a professional ecosystem. A professional ecosystem consists of people who have good visibility in your day-to-day tasks. It may be a group of 7 to 10 people. You may have hundreds of first-level connections in Linkedin, but none of them may have access and visibility into your professional work and are not good candidates for your professional ecosystem.
Examples of a professional ecosystem include:
- Manager – Your reporting managers (First-level, Second-level, and dotted line managers if you have one) will have more visibility into your professional activities. Therefore, it is mandatory to add him or her to the ecosystem.
- Peers – The professionals at your level with whom you collaborate to get your work done.
- Customers or Partners – Your customers or end-users of the services you provide. They can provide good insights into your quality of work as a consumer.
- Team members – A group of people reporting to you. They can provide feedback on your managerial and leadership skills.
As you can see each of them will provide feedback from different perspectives which is important for overall improvement of your professional skills. Please do not be selective and include all professionals who have visibility into your work. The more the better, however quality is also very critical.
Assess and baseline your present state
The next step is to baseline your professional skill level to know where you stand today. This can be done in a few easy steps.
Milestone
Create a milestone of your accomplishments for the last month or two. It can be a simple paragraph that outlines what you have completed in a month and the key skills used to achieve them. It must be a simple and short description that does not consume more than 5 minutes and is easier to understand.
Feedback
Collecting feedback from the members is the next critical step to improve your professional skills for resumes. You must communicate the importance and criticality with the members, and motivate them to provide feedback. Professionals understand the significance of feedback. Yet, it is ideal that you give them sample ideas to make it easier. Learn to make your resume stand out.
It is worth noting that sugar-coated or biased feedback will not help. You need genuine and honest feedback to grow and improve your professional soft skills.
Rate your feedback
The next crucial step is to rate feedback. It can be tricky as human emotions and ego may disrupt your mindset. Read all reviews objectively and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10.
You must capture the ratings and reviews relevant and necessary for your job. Professional skills examples include hard skills like Java, Python, DB, etc., in the case of IT professionals, and soft skills like leadership, communication, collaboration, teamwork, etc. Professionals from any industry can collect feedback on industry-specific hard skills.
After you have collected enough feedback, it is time to compute your review rating. Suppose your current score is baselined as 5, your benchmark is to reach 8 or 9. All the best in landing your first job successfully.
getCREDIBLE - A platform for continuous feedback and improvement
You may be wondering while these tasks appear simple there are a lot of activities to be completed month on month to ensure there is continuous improvement. Fortunately, there is an automated solution for this problem.
getCREDIBLE - Automates all the activities with the following features.
- Setting up your Professional Ecosystem
Invite your colleagues into the professional ecosystem and tag your relationship with them, such as managers, peers, customers, team members, and others.. getCREDIBLE platform builds your ecosystem based on the data, validates them and highlights any possible issues.
- Submitting your milestone
An AI engine will assist you in creating a well-rounded milestone in an open format to ensure all critical elements are included. After submission, the milestone will be sent automatically to the members of your ecosystem.
- Submitting your feedback
getCREDIBLE enables members of your professional ecosystem to submit feedback on your milestone in an open format using the AI engine. The platform keeps the feedback anonymous to ensure its true and unbiased.
- Rating calculation
An ML engine calculates the ratings objectively from feedback without bias and emotions. It gives you a rating on different skills, highlighting your strengths and areas to improve.
- Dashboard view
With intuitive and user-friendly dashboards, you get a graphical representation of your performance on a timeline based view.. You can scroll back and forth to see your performance across different time periods.. It also provides a detailed drill-down facility for you to get in-depth insights on different ratings and skills.
A professional network is essential to build your professional credibility. Add people like your managers, colleagues, peers, and customers to your ecosystem and let them give you genuine feedback anonymously. Use a professional network to drive growth and succeed in your career.
In addition to the above features, let's look at the key functionalities of getCREDIBLE.
Objective feedback on professional skills for resume
getCREDIBLE platform gives objective feedback for you to work on and improve including your soft skills. However, if you collect the feedback manually, you must keep your emotions away and capture objective feedback. It is worth keeping in mind to weed out some anomalies you may encounter.
When you do it manually, you need to structure a strategy to capture all the feedback and upload them to a spreadsheet for further analysis. It is a recurring and tedious task that needs to be attended monthly. Therefore, it is ideal to use getCREDIBLE to automate all the processes associated with it.
A learning plan with a Mentor
It is crucial to identify and choose an expert professional as your mentor. Send the collected feedback and ratings to the mentor using getCREDIBLE. Also, share the feedback collected manually. Your mentor can now understand and comment on your progress easily. It is essential to keep a great mentor to push your limits and motivate you towards the goal. A mentor's role is analogous to a personal trainer at the gym to raise the bar.
Career growth with your improved skills
After improving your skills, the next step is to demonstrate your growth and success to your manager for professional growth. Share it with prospective employers and increase your chance of landing your next job.
Slate, a digital profile from getCREDIBLE, helps you incorporate the feedback and ratings into your profile and exhibit it to the public. It shows a timeline-based graph that indicates your progress and improvements over time to the community. The platform offers the following features to increase your visibility and professional skills for resumes:
A badge titled - 'I am credible.'
- You will earn the badge after three months of consecutive feedback.
- Social media notification badge –
- It displays your existing skill advancements and the new skill acquired.
- Short URL and Analytics
A short URL and page-level analytics help you monitor those who viewed your profile based on location, time, and content.
We are certain that these steps will help you improve your professional skills and leverage them for accelerated career growth.
Good luck! Sign up to start building your professional credibility today.