How to Kickstart Your Post-Summer Career Development

Summary:

Using the end of the summer to reset your approach to development can create new energy for your career. Instead of feeling like another thing to fit in, it can be a new source of motivation that supports everything else you’re trying to do.

Time off gives us much-needed space to slow down and zoom out. Ideally, we return to work ready to reflect on our career progress with a renewed focus on our professional development; however, the pressures of our day jobs can lead us to abandon our good intentions and stall our development.

Engaging in a post-summer reset can help you gain motivation and build momentum for your professional development. The idea is to identify actions that will kick-start your learning in a way that’s easy to add into your day. Here are four ways to get there.

1. Set a growth goal

You’re likely used to having performance goals at work. These goals tend to be set by or in conjunction with your manager and focus on your day-to-day deliverables. At most organizations, it’s less likely that you’re setting similar goals for your professional growth.

Growth goals focus on the strengths you want to stretch or the skills you’d like to learn. You don’t need someone else to define them for you or give you permission to get started. However, sharing your growth goal with your manager and colleagues makes it easier for them to support you and spot opportunities you might not see for yourself.

To create a growth goal, ask yourself the following questions:

What do I want to be known for, and how can I use that skill/strength more?
What do I want to be true about my impact in three months’ time?
Who am I learning from?
What haven’t I done before that I would like to try out?
What am I curious to learn more about?

Here are a few example growth goals:

To lead my first global project in the next six months
To improve my presentation skills and use them in more situations
To develop my coaching capability and use it to support my colleagues

2. Connect with a learning community

It’s much easier to prioritize your development when you’re not trying to do it on your own. When you learn with other people, not only are you more likely to stick to what you start, but the learning gain is more likely to be retained.

Community learning is efficient and effective, which makes it a great use of your time when you’re trying to fit professional development into your busy workweek. A learning community is simply a small group of people who are connected by their curiosity and shared interest in a specific topic. For example, it could be a group of people who want to learn about design thinking or who want to develop management skills.

There’s no limit to what a group can learn about, and if one doesn’t exist for your area of interest, you can easily start one from scratch. For example:

Book clubs or “podsquads,” where people who share an interest in the same topic read or listen together
Technical communities of practice for people who want to learn and experiment with new tools and systems
Career clubs for peers who discuss their development goals and help each other achieve them

3. Start a skill sprint

Skill sprints create a short-term focus for your development and feel easy and motivating to do. Completing a skill sprint gives you a sense of achievement that keeps you committed to your career development, even when the demands of your day job pull you in a different direction.

A five-day skill sprint is a good way to get started. First, pick a skill you want to learn more about. (For inspiration, look at the top skills for work shared by the World Economic Forum.) Then use the sprint plan below to design your daily focus. Reserving just 15 minutes a day on your schedule helps make the sprint an unmissable moment.

Consider this example plan:

Day 1, Learning landscape: Use search and ChatGPT to find out key facts, thought leaders, and available research on the skill you’re focusing on.
Day 2, Expert insight: Pick an expert in the area and dive deeper into their work. Look at their posts on LinkedIn, listen to their perspective on a podcast, and watch what they have to say on video.
Day 3, Put it into practice: Try out a tool or test an idea you’ve read about in your research. Get some feedback from your colleagues to understand how useful it was.
Day 4, Ask for help: Find someone in your organization who’s good at what you want to learn. Get in touch with them, share your insights, and ask for their advice about what else you could do.
Day 5, Capture your learning: The last day of the sprint is for reflection. Ask yourself: What have I learned? How might I apply it at work? How else might I want to develop in this area?

4. Increase your feedback frequency

Feedback is one of the quickest ways you can learn about your impact. The more comfortable you are asking the people you work with for their thoughts, the more insights you’ll accumulate and the more informed you can be about your development.

An easy way to increase your feedback frequency is to ask the same question to several different people. Comparing and contrasting their responses helps you see where you are (or aren’t) showing up consistently at work. The more consistent you are with your impact, the stronger your brand will be.

Consider these feedback questions:

What three words would you use to describe me at my best?
Where do I have the biggest impact in my work?
What one piece of advice would you share with me to increase my influence?

. . .

Using this moment in time to reset your approach to development can create new energy for your career. Instead of feeling like another thing to fit in, it can be a new source of motivation that supports everything else you’re trying to do.

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