Creating My 2024 Professional Development Plan for Career Advancement

As a Career Services professional, I thought it would be in my best interest to work on my own professional development plan for the upcoming year. After some serious research, assessment, and self-exploration, I developed a well-structured and diversified professional development plan that will lay a solid foundation for career advancement.

This is also quite important because doing so increases your quality of life, and January is International Quality of Life Month.

What is a Professional Development Plan?

If you are unfamiliar with what a professional development plan is here is what you should know. According to Duke University, “a professional development plan documents the goals, required skill and competency development, and objectives a staff member will need to accomplish in order to support continuous improvement and career development”.

Oftentimes, this is something that you would work on with your supervisor and revisit during your annual evaluation. However, it’s not always required, therefore it’s something that you may want to develop for yourself.

Preparing My Professional Development Plan

As I prepared my professional development plan, I researched people on LinkedIn who were doing the jobs that I would consider as my next position(s). I then identified my skills gaps and searched for a variety of ways to enhance those skills through knowledge, understanding, and application, better known as Bloom’s taxonomy.

A few weeks after getting started, I received an email from Jobscan with a ChatGPT prompt to help those interested in closing their skills gap. I was immediately interested. I wanted to see if it was similar to what I had already put together through my self-exploration, self-assessment, and research.

Here is what I found.

I found that many of the courses that were recommended by ChatGPT were fictional or outdated, however, they led to very similar online courses that could work.

From the list given, I appreciate that the courses were diversified in terms of being offered from various online schools and platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera, EdX, etc.

Aside from solely relying on online courses, I made sure to include a handful of books and association conferences, as well. In addition, I made notes on how I would apply my knowledge in real-time which is essential.

If you are interested in creating your own professional development plan, I really believe that using the following ChatGPT prompt is a great way to get started. It is not the end all – be all. It is a start to get you thinking in a positive direction.

If you would like to learn more about developing your own personal development plan, feel free to let me know in the comments.