by Eddie Litonjua
Personal development is a widely used but rarely explained term.
In essence, it’s the lifelong process of investing in yourself. It’s about expanding your knowledge and skillsets so you can attain the goals you set yourself, both personally and professionally.
Personal development is about engaging proactively with life. Rather than waiting for good things to happen, you get out there and make things happen.
Committing to personal development is the first step in achieving both your personal and professional goals. While it might be “personal”, self-development isn’t something you do all on your own. Alison offers a wide range of tools that empower you to develop yourself and achieve your career goals. Here are five of the best.
Psychometric Testing – Understanding Yourself Better
When it comes to your professional life, understanding yourself better means being self-aware of your values, expertise and capabilities. When deliberating between possible career moves, understanding yourself better will enable you to make decisions that positively impact your life. Knowing what you want from your career and the type of work environment or culture you will thrive in goes a long way in helping you pursue the perfect career path. Taking a psychometric test is one of the simplest and most effective ways of understanding yourself professionally. Nowadays, psychometric testing is a common part of many interviews as employers seek to know if a candidate is likely to excel in a certain role or career. Employers run such tests to assess your intelligence, skills, and personality. The tests can also gauge your capacity to handle stress, your inductive reasoning, situational judgment, and how well you work with others.
Alison provides a free workplace personality assessment to help you identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie. These tests have been administered to some of the world’s top corporate enterprises and are backed by rigorous, scientific evaluation. This assessment is a great way to get a better sense of yourself professionally
The Career Guide – Navigating An Everchanging Job Landscape
The modern job market is constantly changing. The employment landscape as it exists today is vastly different from what it was even a few years ago. The workforce continues to change at a rapid pace and more than half of the jobs that will be available in 2030 do not even exist yet. Consider where we are now. The Covid-19 pandemic was completely unpredicted and resulted in millions of people losing their jobs, while at the same time, plenty of opportunities also emerged. With that in mind, it’s important to be able to constantly adapt when it comes to your career.
Alison’s Career Guide allows you to explore hundreds of potential alternative careers. This fantastic tool can be searched by Industry, Career Path or Occupation and offers vital information on the career in question. The Career Guide also links you to relevant courses related to that industry. The Alison Career Guide is the perfect tool for researching different careers and learning which skills you need to succeed
Craft the Perfect CV – Presenting Yourself
One of the toughest challenges in the job-seeking process is writing a good CV. Crafting a professional and eye-catching CV is necessary to make you stand out from the other candidates and help you secure that all-important interview.
The exact format and content of your CV depends on the industry you’re pursuing a career in. However, there are some universal constants to include when writing your CV. We cover these key elements in a variety of online courses. Learn how to design a professional header and layout, concisely outline your experience and discover the various formats you should use, depending on the career you’re pursuing.
Alternatively, let us do the thinking for you. Our free Resumé Builder is quick and easy to use, gives you unlimited downloads forever and seamlessly integrates with your Alison profile allowing you to add your Certificates and Diplomas in just a few clicks.
Learning Hubs – Gaining Expertise
Without expertise knowledge on a particular subject or in a specific field, your career opportunities will be limited to jobs with a low skillset entry point. This confines you to applying for low paid work as the more specialised your job, the higher the salary you tend to earn. In order to get the best out of yourself and maximise your earning potential, it’s important to develop a unique and valuable set of skills, abilities and knowledge. A CV that marks you out as an expert in your chosen field will allow you to apply for more tailored roles that demand higher salaries.
To help you master your chosen subject or skill, Alison is launching a series of Learning Hubs. Learning Hubs are spaces where you can immerse yourself in a particular topic and access a range of courses that will both broaden and deepen your understanding of a subject. While there are many more Hubs to come, our debut offering is the Microsoft Learning Hub. Fluency in the full suite of Microsoft programs is an invaluable skillset and this Learning Hub is the perfect place to familiarise yourself with courses from Excel to PowerPoint. The Hubs also include Frequently Asked Questions and links to Alison Blog posts that will expand your knowledge on your chosen topic.
Interview Skills – Doing Yourself Justice
A job interview is your chance to show your potential employer that you are the right person for the job. It’s your chance to showcase the skills and expertise that you’ve worked hard to develop. If you’ve managed to get to the interview stage, then you have every reason to be confident that you’re fully qualified and deserving of the job in question. It’s crucial that you acknowledge and own that confidence during the interview itself. Don’t be modest about your accomplishments or your CV – show the organisation that they need you
Alison offers a series of interview-focused courses that cover all of the relevant topics to help you succeed in doing yourself, and your achievements, justice when it comes to the job interview. These courses includes all of the key soft and interpersonal skills necessary for making a great first impression, and also a lasting one. Also included are courses that will teach you about HR and hiring practices to give you a better idea of the techniques and lines of questioning you might encounter in the interview.
Eddie Litonjua helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their business on his blog Passive Income Tree. A consultant by day, he applies his knowledge from the business world to identify winning business models for generating passive income and finding the best software and tools to do this.
