What is Career Development?

"Career development is all about taking responsibility for the direction that your career goes in."

It's about being constantly aware of the skills, capabilities and goals that you want to achieve and about taking proactive action to achieve them.

Good career development can have a significant impact on the quality of your home and work life. It can contribute to the way that you perceive yourself and others around you, to the type of person that you become in the future and ultimately the income and resources that you have available in the future.

"Career development ensures you are equipped with the right skills for the future."

The world in which we live is changing at an ever increasing rate and the way the way that we learn and work is constantly changing in response. No longer are there such things as jobs for life which depended on a traditional approach to career development i.e. once you'd selected your chosen career, you moved up the hierarchy in a pre-set, structured manner (often know as 'doing your time').

Nowadays, because organisations are subject to such rapid social and technological changes, the skills and capabilities of the people working for them need to constantly change and expand too. Not only that, but in all this flux, organisations have become less willing to make long term commitments meaning that the responsibility for being 'employable' and having lots of options open for the future has switched firmly towards the individual.

"As we've already established career development is all about accepting, embracing and managing change."

As such there are lots of factors that change over time that could affect the type of career development you get involved in at any point in time. Here are some examples:

• Current work committments
• Personal / family life responsibilities
• Extra-curricular activities
• Budget - How much money available to invest
• Time - How much 'free' time you have available
• Existing study committments
• Economic climate
• Political environment
• Your social network
• Your professional network

In order to be truely effective at career development it's important to realise that it's a long term process that you will need to dip in and out of as priorities in your personal and work life change.

"We provide easy to use career guides to support your career development."

At My Performance Pitstop, we are dedicated to helping individuals with their career developmentand so we've developed a set of high quality downloadable guides that provide individuals with easy to use, step by step advice, checklists and resources that can be used to develop their skills and capability in key areas.

Our guides are designed to be used at a time and place that suits you and as a support for other development activities you might be involved in which is why they fit so well with the career development cycle.