Practical Steps To Personal Development

Practical steps can be taken to enhance personal development, including:

• Organising your time.
• Producing a personal CV or résumé.
• Undertaking a skills appraisal.
• Looking at your transferable skills.
• Overcoming barriers to learning a new skill.

Organising Your Time
If you are considering making changes in your life, finding additional time often poses a problem. It could be that the changes you are thinking of making are to ensure you have extra time to:

• Spend with your family.
• Spend on things you enjoy doing.
• Devote to your work.
• Devote to your education

Whatever the reason, looking at how you spend your time will encourage you to think of ways your time could be managed more effectively.

• Learning to say 'no' to jobs or requests that you feel are not your responsibility.
• Learning to delegate – sharing jobs can be fun and will leave you with more time.
• Making a ’to do’ list of tasks you need to do each day/week, ticking off tasks that you complete.
• Giving up things you do not really want or need to do.
• Identifying your high and low times of the day. Everyone has a time when he/she feels more or less energetic. Try to do the most demanding tasks when you have the greatest energy as you will do them more quickly, thereby releasing more time to spend on other things.

For many people their personal development will involve setting goals; these might be to change behaviour - as in looking at their time management - learning new skills or advancing their career.

Many employers are looking for the same sorts of skills. These include good communication skills, the ability to work as part of a team and the ability to learn – these are often termed ‘Soft Skills’ and are the sorts of skills that SkillsYouNeed writes about. Beyond that the skills required will depend on the particular job.

http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/personal-development.html