Developing your career and professional expertise starts with identifying what you are trying to achieve both in terms of your long-terms goals and your immediate development needs that help with the day-to-day aspects of your current position.
Career Mapping
The Career Mapping Toolkit can help you determine your skills and knowledge and provide insights into the breadth and complexity required to take your career within the HE sector forward.
The SFIA Foundation also has outlined a range of skills and competencies that relate to professionals who work in roles related to data and digital technologies.
Professional Development Planning
UCISA has created a Personal Development Plan template that you can use if you don’t have access to one via your employer. (Access via Resources portal)
How to Create a Personal Development Plan
This guide on Creating a Personal Development Plan can be found on UCISA Resources.
What counts as Personal Development?
Learning can happen in a range of situations and doesn’t necessarily need to involve formal training. Working in IT in an educational setting provides a huge range of opportunities to learn and develop new skills as well as gain experience of putting those new skills into action. While informal, learning through on the job helps with.
- Understanding the context of your role and how to apply your skills in that context
- Building relationships with your co-workers through learning from their real-world experiences
- Providing immediate feedback on how you’re developing your knowledge and skills
But what counts as on-the-job learning? Below are some suggestions that you might come across that can aid you in developing your specific IT expertise or broader core skills.
- Observing important meetings either internal or across the institution
- Job shadowing a colleague
- Being shown how to use an application by a colleague
- Engaging in job-related online communities
- Participating in workshops not related to day-to-day job role
- Representing your team in cross-institutional groups
- Researching a new technology or approach to IT services
- Sharing your learning with your team or department
- Presenting to Committees on behalf of your team or department
- Providing cover for senior members of the department
- Leading an internal team project
- Presenting on behalf of your team or department at an external event
- Delivering a challenging or new work project or event
- Leading a cross-institutional group
All of these types of learning and development can be included in your personal development plan.
Additional Resources
The CPD Cycle is explained here by the CPD Certification Service
- The British Computing Society Personal Development Planning Guide.
- Open University Guide on Personal Development Planning
