Your Professional Growth

No one will pay as close attention to your personal growth and development as you will. Whether you're lucky enough to work for an organization that encourages a learning mindset for everyone or whether you’re in a place where only a handful of stars get all the heat and light when it comes to professional development, you are the best person to create and monitor your own curriculum. And increasingly in today's workplaces, you are responsible.

Without an HR specialist or a personal coach to guide you, how can you assess your own strengths and weaknesses, gather and distill meaningful feedback, set goals for yourself beyond your job duties, gain the new skills you need to stay relevant and excel, nurture your curiosity, and continue to learn, grow, and evolve into your best self at work? Whether your development plan is vague or clear, you can establish a course to acquire and maintain the skills you'll need to be successful and close the gap between where you are now and where you'd like to be.

This guide will help you set achievable goals and chart the steps needed to reach them, whether you're new to the workforce or at a turning point in your career. You'll learn to:

• Identify current gaps in your knowledge or skills
• Pinpoint your unique strengths
• Visualize your future self
• Develop or nurture a growth mindset
• Motivate yourself to start learning--and to keep going
• Recognize and remove self-made obstacles
• Discover how to identify and evaluate educational opportunities, from formal business degrees to online courses to industry events and conferences
• Find or form a learning community to support and sustain you
• Continue to set new goals

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from a source you trust. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Harvard Business Review is the leading destination for smart management thinking. Through its flagship magazine, 13 international licensed editions, books from Harvard Business Review Press, and digital content and tools published on HBR.org, Harvard Business Review provides professionals around the world with rigorous insights and best practices to lead themselves and their organizations more effectively and to make a positive impact.

Author social media/website info: hbr.org