Career development goes beyond the simple booking of a training course or starting a commitment to any one number of the project management certifications and accreditations available. These five cheap and cheerful career development resources are designed to help you think differently about some of the aspects of your project management career development.
Let’s kick off with the skills gap; a fundamental starting point for anyone thinking about where their career is heading. Your skills gap analysis should ideally be performed independently of your current work situation – in other words, don’t be a slave to how your manager wants to see you develop.
Let’s start with the first resource; it’s free and easily accessible; your brain and a sheet of A4. Understanding how you’re currently doing, gaining a snapshot of what areas you’re currently doing well with; what technical and soft skills you feel you’re particularly strong in; which industrial or business sectors you feel most of your work is in; what formal training you already have. Would you feel comfortable writing a side of A4, a profile of you covering this information? It helps in the career development process to have a really good understanding of who you think you really are and more importantly what kind of project professional you think you really are. Take the time to do it no matter how “hard” you think it is. If it helps use your CV has a basis to start.
When you’ve done the profile, it’s time to look at Wordle. Wordle is a word cloud website which is a little bit of fun or as one of my connections on Twitter said recently; “What a scary thought, putting a CV through Wordle – not sure I want to see what comes out the other end!” Be brave and you’ll be amazed at how useful the output can be. The Wordle programme allows you to put your profile (or CV) in and then produces an image based on the words you’ve used – the frequency in the text. What it allows you to see is the visual form of the profile you’ve written. If you think you are particularly expert in change management however the cloud comes back with “change” being a tiny word you know you have work to do with how you represent yourself
Skills gap analysis is one of those activities that does not tend to get done 
frequently – at least not on your own terms outside the corporate environment. If you have not looked at a formal project management competency framework, consider it. The framework in essence is the breakdown of the core competencies that are expected in a project manager and the different levels of competent within each core component. To have a preview of the APM’s Competency Framework (the full book version is available at £29.50) you can take a look at the PDF that is available as part of APM’s Registered Project Professional webpage. The PDF entitled RPP Competences is taken from the Competency Framework (but does not show the full range of competences) and can be used as an initial skills gap tool. Just download the PDF. For each competence, just read through the definition and give a tick against each indicator (or level) of your corresponding level of experience. This quick, easy and free tool will quickly show you where your gaps might be in the competency areas listed. If you want to do the full version, just purchase the book.
One of blockers to thinking about career development plans for the future is the conflict between how you want to develop and what the organisation you work for wants you to develop. So how can you plan effectively so all parties are happy? Another free and relatively easy way to do this is tapping into the NLP model called “perceptual positions”. A tool predominantly used in communications techniques, it is also highly effective when planning an activity too so it works pretty well for career development. It is based on three different perspectives.
- Your own (so your own thoughts and feelings about your career development)
- Another perspective (in this case your manager’s or your organisation)
- A neutral perspective (in effect a “fly on the wall” view with no biased interested in either 1 or 2)
Write down your thoughts about your own development whilst in position 1; from your own perspective what do you want. Next, move position, get up and move to another desk or chair. Sit down with another piece of paper and imagine you are your manager or someone in the organisation who is responsible for development matters. Write down on the paper as if you were the manager i.e., “I would like XXX to consider doing XXXXX development this year” not “My manager would like me to xxxxxx”. The idea is that you are completing seeing things from your organisations point of view. Finally, the neutral position; it can help if you imagine a helicopter view looking down on the first two positions. Asking questions that a neutral observer might use; where is the common ground between these two views? Where is the divide in views? Where could the compromise be? Where are the facts in the views? Which are assumptions in the views?
Try it and you might be pleasantly surprised at how understanding a little more about different points of view will give you more options and choices in your career development
Finally, still free and easy to use is the sheer number of free resources that are available on the web. There are literally hundreds and thousands of free project management podcasts, vodcasts, seminars, blogs, virtual conferences and good old fashioned websites. Before you dismiss it as a careers development resource or just can’t be bothered getting into the technology I’ll try to make it easier for you.
If you’ve not tried a podcast yet – try Parallel Project – they have been podcasting since 2009 and have a wide range of podcasts covering different technical areas of project management with a more recent one on the new RPP standard. All you need to do to listen on your PC is go to the website: http://parallelprojecttraining.libsyn.com/rss and choose the media file. That’s it.
If you have a mobile device for listening on the move, say an iPhone, just open the iTunes app, hit Search for “Parallel Project” and scroll to Podcasts. You can listen without downloading (works better when you’re on WiFi) by clicking on the number. If you want to download it, just click Free.
For further top rated project management podcasts, you can also try Cornelius Fichtner’s popular “Project Management Podcast” by clicking and listening online here or searching for “project management podcast” on your device in iTunes. Our very own podcast can be found on the Arras People website just click to download an episode or search for us by name on iTunes. Finally a relatively new podcast from Talking Work featuring interviews with project professionals, the chatty style and diversity in guests makes this podcast an easy listen. Just search for “Talking Work” in iTunes.
Credit illuminated head image to dierkschaefer at Flickr, re-used with permission. Credit Perceptual Positions image to fedcomite at Flickr, re-used with permission.
Twitter: giladlsh
Great article!
New ways for using such tools for career development.
Gilad