A good professional development plan has three essential components: technical skills, time- and project-management skills, and business and customer skills. If one of these is missing, you'll never achieve an exceptional level of customer service, Morrow says.
Acquiring technical skills involves more than classroom training, of course. How many hours have you spent this month reading technical books and professional journals? How many hours have you spent training others or writing documentation? All these undertakings exercise your technology brain, but the pressure of having to teach someone else how to do something forces you to raise your level of knowledge on the subject.
Beware of training for training's sake--if you don't use it, you lose it. "The worst thing people do is go to training, get all pumped for it and then do absolutely nothing with it," Turner says. "That happens all the time."
A good way to kill two birds with one stone is to have the recipient of training teach new skills to others. If you're launching a peer-based training program at your organization, however, here's one tip: Don't bite off too much at once. If you start out asking people to teach half-day classes, this may be a bit daunting. Have practitioners give a half-hour class, perhaps as a way to mix up a staff meeting, on tips and tricks regarding their specialty; this can be enough in the beginning.
Get Thee to the Lab
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.
