Professional Development for the Information Professional Part 2 - The Professional Development Plan

This is a reworking of a post that I originally wrote for the AIIM blog. Because of its length, I'm breaking it into two parts. The first post presents a professional development framework. In this part, I'll present a matrix that can be used to turn the framework into an individual professional development plan. 

Your Professional Development Plan

What if we train our staff and they leave? What if we don’t – and they stay?

-- Often attributed to Henry Ford

Your final step is to put all of this together into your own professional development plan. Every information professional – in fact, every professional – needs a professional development plan. You have to stay current in order to stay relevant. And relevance is relative: there’s a difference between staying where you’re at – treading water – and setting out to get a better position, more pay, or increased responsibilities. You’re the only one who knows what road you’re on – meaning you have to take responsibility for your own professional development plan.

I can’t tell you exactly what should go into your plan, but I’ve put together a framework that is comprehensive, yet flexible, to allow you to develop a plan that makes sense for you and your professional goals.

I’ve already talked about some of the learning mechanisms like conferences, webinars, and training. These are more formal options insofar as they are scheduled, cost money, etc., but this is only one approach. Many professionals have found success through less formal and more experiential sorts of approaches, such as on-the-job training, mentoring, and coaching. In addition, professionals should always cultivate and maintain an understanding of the foundational works within a discipline – industry standards, best practices, books that capture fundamental practices and processes, and so forth. And there are a variety of other less formal resources available, including industry magazines and blogs from associations, vendors, and individual thought leaders.

This framework recommends that individual professionals look at professional development through a matrix. The individual employee would determine what skills to work on in each of the different competency areas, and then would select learning mechanisms based on availability, timing, budgets, etc. This might be reviewed by the individual’s manager, particularly where approval for travel, a training course or conference, etc. is required, but ultimately, it’s the responsibility of individuals to determine their own appropriate learning paths and outcomes.

Here's a template for what this might look like:

And here's what my personal plan looks like for 2022: 

Couple of points. 

• There's no column for degrees, as that's not something you'd do every year. 
• There's no row for organizational competencies, as there aren't really training, webinars, certifications, etc. for those. 
• My columns for coaching and mentoring and OJT are N/A because I'm not focusing on the first ones this year and as a solo consultant OJT isn't really relevant to me (or, alternately, every day is OJT!)

I'll write another post in January that addresses costs and how to pay for things, including some grant opportunities that are out there.