Professional Skills Development

1. In this module of your work we have been discussing your profession and your career. What do you understand as the difference between your profession and your career?

2. There are a number of life experiences that can contribute to your career development and increase your competence to work as a professional.Outline two of your own life or work experiences that you feel have enabled you to develop skills which you will be able to transfer to your professional career. 

 

My Career and Profession in the IT sector

With the dramatic changes in the IT industry as well as corporate IT departments because of the impacts of social media along with consumer technological advancement, I have successfully pursued my career as a IT professional especially in the sector of cloud computing. My profession is project manager in the Information Technology department which includes the career path of excelling in Microsoft office, .NET and SQL. The career objectives of mine include- reward deserving approaches and having a good relationship with each of my subordinate, participating in team work, enabling growth opportunities for the employees, flexibility of choices. My profession in this industry is about career development of mine in the next five years and in the mean time absolute growth of the company as per the specific goals linked with each of the projects that have been assigned to me (Ibarra, 2013).

On the other hand, Career as a IT project manager is like the backbone that holds diverse life and job experiences so that I can learn and thereby fuel my professional life with diverse IT opportunities with future applications. So, my career is about the occupation of IT project manager of mine which I have been doing for a major period of my life and I want greater level of opportunities so that progress will come to the surface (Sharf, 2014). Whereas, for my profession in the IT sector, I have chosen the roles and responsibilities, like- planning as well as defining the scope of a project, activity planning, resource planning, sequencing, developing schedules, time estimating, cost estimating, budget development and documentation for which I get paid and I have gone through systematic training and development process as well as formal qualifications.

My life and work experiences on the way to develop my skills and competencies

I have been through many of the vital life experiences while undertaking my roles and responsibilities as a IT project manager and these experiences have literally helped me to increase my competency as well as these experiences have major contribution towards my career development. Recently, I have found that my presentation skills are less effective in contrast with what I have expected earlier and it was possible because of the methodical feedback process of the organisation, known as- 360 degree feedback analysis (Ibarra, 2013). Along with this, I also feel stressed whenever I face time based pressure and with continuing experience in this sector for over 25 years, gradually I have acquired immense experiences when I attended presentation skill courses, participated in different presentations in the beginning of a project, got feedback as well as performed my presentations to the council. For this, I came to know that proper training, organisational practices, feedback system and guidelines are needed so that I can work on my management, leadership, problem-solving, teamwork, time management, communication, information and technical skills.

I have developed these skills and transferred those towards my professional career as IT project manager when I found that my SMART objectives based actions and tasks in the work environment were not up to the mark while performance appraisal was going on in the workplace (Sharf, 2014). That’s why the professional development planning of mine included gathering more experience towards the administrative position of mine which helped me to reach at both my personal as well as professional goals. With these two life work experiences which occurred many years before, since then I have been working on my managerial skills, teamwork skills, time management skills as well as presentation and IT skills so that I will be in the board of directors pretty soon.  

References 

Ibarra, H., 2013. Working identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Harvard Business Press.

Sharf, R.S., 2014. Applying career development theory to counseling. Brooks/Cole.