10 Activities That Will Help You Develop Professionally

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Professional development is a powerful strategy that can enhance your career, boost your salary, and lead to amazing opportunities. Keeping an open mind is only the first step – actively pursuing development opportunities shows your commitment to continuous improvement and boosts your resume. In this guide, we’ll cover the top 10 activities to develop and grow your career, including online courses and professional mentorship programs.

Why Is Professional Development Important?

Honing your skills, making new connections, and earning certifications all lead you to better opportunities. Learning more professional abilities expands your repertoire and opens you up to:

• Work achievements: Hard work and new skills increase your performance and enable you to accomplish powerful goals, impressing your employer and increasing your self-confidence.
• Recognition and prizes: With keener skills, you achieve greater results and your leaders take notice, allowing you to earn rewards. For example, a sales company might offer gift cards to a team that surpasses its sales quota.
• A stronger resume: Professional development is a great addition to your resume, enhancing your future job-seeking efforts.

Achievements on your resume like certifications and mentorships prove your skills and display a commitment to learning, making you an attractive candidate and opening doors to better job opportunities.

10 Best Activities That Help You Develop Professionally

Let’s not waste any more time – here are our top 10 activities to develop professionally.

1. In-person workshops

In-person workshops are lessons or gatherings where professionals learn new skills. It’s often a collaborative environment where you interact with other professionals, sharing ideas with participants and actively talking about the topic with the host through Q&A sessions and open discussion.

These classes are usually an opportunity to build soft skills like communication and leadership. This means they passively improve your professional skills, but they’re also a great addition to your history of projects and achievements.

2. Online courses

Professional online courses are an excellent chance to improve your skills and earn certificates. There are hundreds of different online courses, ranging from free courses to individual paid lessons to entire paid subscriptions to online learning programs.

Workers love online courses because they cover a nearly limitless number of subjects, including DEI training, conflict resolution, project management, and programming languages.

3. Mentoring and coaching programs

The best way to learn is collaboratively – gleaning information from other professionals who are passionate about what they do is a great environment to absorb skills and competencies.

Where can you find a partner? Online mentoring programs make it simple to get matched with a mentor or coach and start learning today. Services like Pushfar make it easy to sign up for free, fill out a profile, and receive suggestions for your ideal mentor.

Then you can get right to work learning key insights from professionals in your industry through a one-time session or long-term mentoring for 3, 6, or 12 months.

4. Seminars, webinars, and presentations

Seminars, or the virtual equivalent webinars, are educational events focused on interaction and sharing new, innovative ideas and thought leadership. These presentations often feature well-known business leaders and innovators and involve deep, probing interviews and insights.

Attending relevant seminars helps you stay relevant to professional trends, which is especially important in rapidly changing sectors like marketing, SEO, and tech fields like software and web development.

5. Professional certifications

Official certification of your skills and capabilities is an amazing addition to your career. Many job roles benefit from certificates because they’re a third-party validation of your qualifications, and many other elements of a resume are simply your opinion.

Some positions, such as healthcare and food service roles, are much easier to get into with certain certifications. For example, a nurse should have a CPR certification, and a bartender should have a ServSafe certification.

Professional certification also boosts your confidence as it gives you tangible evidence of your abilities.

6. Volunteering & internships

Volunteering is a great way to get your foot in the door, make professional connections, and gain real-life experience. Because this work is unpaid, it’s also usually easy to find opportunities.

This tip is valuable for every professional, but it’s especially helpful to students and people switching careers as they don’t often have a long history of relevant work experience. Committing to volunteer work or internships gives you strong material for your resume that you can list like work experience and quantify with impactful metrics.

7. Bootcamps

Bootcamps are in-depth, immersive learning experiences that typically take several weeks or months to complete. Unlike studying from textbooks, bootcamps offer practical, hands-on experience where learners dive into lessons that mimic actual on-the-job experiences.

These opportunities are fairly versatile, but they’re most common for computer-centric skills like programming, coding, data science, analysis, and digital marketing.

8. Job shadowing

Job shadowing is an active way to absorb new skills and involves following another professional around as they complete their work, observing how they use their abilities and get through the day. This technique is common when onboarding a new employee, but is becoming increasingly more common to help colleagues and students develop new skills and enhance their careers.

9. Networking events

Expanding your professional network is essential for career development – it can introduce you to new roles, opportunities, or even promotions. These events are generally industry-specific and designed for people to get together, exchange information, build relationships, and start partnerships.

Depending on the event, this activity can be combined with our point on seminars – meeting new people during seminars is a great way to grow your network.

10. Peer teaching

This activity is a great way to learn new things and expand your perspective while also boosting your own confidence. Peer teaching is a collaborative learning strategy where learners take on the role of student and teacher, providing each other with insights, experiences, and opinions.

This allows you to learn new things while you pass your knowledge on to others. As a bonus, it also increases your communication and teamwork skills.

Commit to Continuous Improvement and Develop Professionally

Continuous learning builds your professional skills, boosts your confidence, and gives you powerful achievements for your resume. It also shows employers your commitment to improvement.

Consider your job role, industry, and interests, and choose which activities best suit your career. As an added bonus, you’ll automatically be more effective at activities you enjoy.

We recommend point 3 to all professionals, no matter their position. Mentoring and coaching are powerful ways to enhance your career skills, grow, and meet insightful new people.

Ready to get started? You can sign up for Pushfar’s mentoring programs for free today.

Author Bio

James Bunes, an accomplished copywriter, editor, and strategist, draws on his experience in job search and HR writing to create insightful content on resumes, career guidance, and job hunting techniques.