Training and personal development

What does personal development mean?

Personal development is the process of self-development and also the development of others. At the level of the individual, personal development includes goals, plans or actions oriented towards one or more of the following aims:

• improved time management
• improved stress management
• improved personal efficiency
• improved confidence
• improved assertiveness
• improved creativity
• improved understanding of career change
• fulfilling aspirations

Any sort of development requires a framework to establish whether change has actually occurred or not. In the case of personal development, individuals often function as their own primary judge of improvement.

Validation of objective improvement, however, requires assessment using standard criteria. Such framework for personal development may include goals or benchmarks that define the end-points, strategies or plans for reaching goals and a feedback system to provide information on changes.

With so much emphasis on the professional element of development, it's important to remember that training in more personal aspects of development, also sometimes called soft-skills, will also help businesses be more effective if their employees are as efficient and happy as they can be.

Improving Personal Effectiveness

Personal effectiveness is a combination of factors that impact each other. Personal Development incorporates many aspects of people's professional lives, and aims to make them better. Personal effectiveness courses are usually designed to develop key skills and techniques needed to build personal impact, influence and effectiveness in dealings with themselves, their workloads and with others. Personal effectiveness courses seek to address the following objectives:

• Analyse current effectiveness in terms of time and priority management
• Recognise factors that contribute towards building personal profile and impact
• Develop personal action plans to enhance personal effectiveness at work
• Identify appropriate situations and techniques for assertive communication
• Improve ability to deal with “difficult” people and conflict situations
• Evaluate the most appropriate influencing styles to achieve positive results