How to make a plan for your professional development for 2024 in order to achieve your goals accurately

Step 1. Decide what kind of development you want

Professional development can go in several directions, so it is important to clearly understand which area you are interested in. Any specialist has four possible options:

1. Career development. That is, the traditional movement up the career ladder, promotion within a certain field of activity. For example, now you are an Internet marketer, but you want to become a marketing director.
2. Developing new skills. You can grow professionally and achieve salary increase without promotion. To do this, you need to regularly upgrade your skills, try new things and put it into practice. For example, an IT specialist can start working with new programming languages, and a recruitment specialist can develop a corporate culture.
3. Cross‑functional development. The study of related fields of activity allows you to combine several positions at once. This is often found in the field of marketing, where an Internet marketer can simultaneously be a specialist in contextual advertising, SEO, SMM and content.
4. Expert development. Mentors, internal staff trainers, and teachers at business schools are professionals who show their high level of expertise and bring additional benefits to the business by training employees. And specialists from all fields have opportunities in this area — from accountants to top managers of companies.

Step 2. Formulate specific goals

Avoid vague statements like "I want my salary to be higher" or "I want to find a job in a good company." You should clearly see the desired result: "Salary in 2024 should increase by 30%" or "I want to find a job in a large IT company ‑ on a remote , with VMI, sports payment and free tuition."

To do this, it is enough to monitor current vacancies in your field. Evaluate what is required from employees who receive more than you. This is exactly what should be included in the list of competencies for development in the new year.

Let's say you are an HR who is only engaged in recruitment. According to the monitoring results, it turned out that specialists with the salary level you need are also engaged in the adaptation, motivation and evaluation of employees. In this case, the list of goals will be as follows:

• Mastering the tools for adapting office and remote employees.
• The study of methods of material and non-material motivation.
• Mastering the methods of personnel assessment and development.

Step 4. Identify problem areas

The simplest tool that will help in this is the "Competence Wheel". That's how it works. Write down eight key skills that will help you achieve your goal, and rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how well they are developed at the moment. This will clearly show you which areas of knowledge should be improved in the first place.

This list should include current and missing professional knowledge, as well as personal effectiveness skills. For example, in the case of the same HR specialist who wants to achieve a salary increase, these may be:

• Search for candidates.
• Conducting interviews.
• Adaptation of beginners.
• Employee motivation.
• Employee evaluation.
• Time management.
• Conducting negotiations.
• Emotional intelligence.

Step 5. Make a plan to develop the necessary skills

Effective self-development always consists of two stages: the study of theory and the practical application of acquired knowledge. If you limit yourself to one thing, then there is a risk that you will never achieve your cherished goal. Therefore, it is important to draw up a clear step-by-step plan in both directions.

Theory

It is necessary to study the theory in order to form a general idea of the skill, analyze different points of view and understand how all this should work in practice in the end.

In order for the process to be as effective as possible, it is not necessary to limit yourself to any one source of information ‑ for example, to draw knowledge only from books or articles by a single expert. Try different options: This will help you get the most complete picture of the topic.

Books, podcasts, articles by market experts, video reviews, courses will come to the rescue. Much is freely available on the Web — use it.

Practice

With the practical component, everything is a little more complicated. Ideally, you need a mentor here who will help you understand the intricacies of real work with the studied tools and tell you how they can show themselves exactly within the framework of your activity. For example, it may be a course teacher or a senior colleague who has already achieved some success in an area of interest to you.

If there are no such opportunities, then you will have to act independently — by trial and error. And it is better to enlist the support of management at this stage: explain how your new knowledge will help in your work, what you plan to do and what results it will help achieve. In this case, the price of error will not be too high for you, which means that you can avoid the "fear of a clean slate".

The main thing is to implement new tools in stages and constantly monitor the situation. Then your New Year's goal will not turn into a dummy, but will become a real motivator on the way to success.