You can break this down into two parts, Personal and Professional.
Personal development refers more to the soft skills or interpersonal skills. These are more likely developed over time with experience such as communication skills, assertiveness, dealing with conflict.
Professional development focuses more toward the career in mind, the current role and future aspirations and although this will of course include personal skills mentioned above, you will find that professional development is linked to more formal training such as further education or bespoke learning in the workplace.
When you evaluate the benefits of both of these you need to consider how valuable the learning will be and weigh it up against financial costs and time invested. Learning is never a waste but it does need to be relevant and help you achieve your goals.
Benefits
There are some obvious benefits you will probably be able to think about quite quickly.
Promotions
Developing yourself within your role could offer opportunities that lead to promotions up the ladder or indeed transfers to other parts of an organisation that you have been wanting to progress into.
Financial rewards
Some organisations offer incentives for achieving qualifications or completing training such as pay rises or bonuses.
Self esteem and confidence
Don’t underestimate the power of this benefit. It can make quite an impact on how you perform and come across to others. Taking control of your own development and becoming competent in what you do will always attract respect from your colleagues and build on your confidence. I’m sure we can all think of a particular task we avoided like the plague because we weren’t very good at. Push yourself to learn and become an expert in the areas you don’t do well.
Happiness
Yes, happiness! Being a better version of yourself will improve your mood. In fact all of the above benefits will contribute to a happier employee.
From an organisations point of view the benefits of personal and professional development of their staff is a matter of investment. Creating a high performance team through encouraging learning and development has a huge impact of staff retention, investing time and money into their people speaks volumes about the culture and reputation of the company. Retaining staff is a significant benefit as recruitment is expensive, time consuming and there then follows the time needed for new staff members.
A highly trained team of employees is paramount to meeting strategic objectives and the vision of the organisation for the future. There is quite a list of benefits we could go into here strategically but for the purpose of this subject area the above already mentioned is sufficient to cover the criteria.
Learners, if you are undertaking the Level 3 or 4 Diploma in Management then this post will assist you with the following criteria:
Unit 300 ML9 2.1 Evaluate the benefits of personal and professional development