Career Corner: Staying on top of your professional development

When was the last time you updated your résumé or your LinkedIn profile? Do you regularly review the projects you’re working on to see what skills you have developed—or skills you might want to develop to do your job better?

It can be easy, in the bustle of your everyday work commitments, to forget that you are always preparing for your next professional opportunity, whether that’s an opportunity to take on a new responsibility in your current role, or taking on an entirely new position.  What can you do to be ready for those opportunities?

• Keep a file of your accomplishments: Whether it’s in your email inbox, your desk drawer, or a folder at home, keep a copy of fliers from events you organized, positive feedback from colleagues and supervisors, numbers of customers served, or the details of a particularly knotty problem you solved. This record provides you a way to measure your productivity, and it makes a really nice addition to your annual performance review! (Thanks to Chrissie Greenberg for sharing this tip!)
• Keep your résumé updated: As you develop new skills in your current position and as your job changes, reassess your résumé every 6 months and revise it as necessary. After you’ve been in your job a while, you may realize that your job profile has completely changed. This is also a great way to prepare for your annual review: you’ll be ready to complete your self-evaluation with plenty of concrete details!
• Regularly check out available HR trainings: by reviewing your résumé, you may realize that you need to develop a specific skill to meet your changing job responsibilities or that you want learn a new technology to improve your current performance. When you identify a training that would be useful, be ready to explain to your supervisor why it makes sense for you to undertake it. HR Training sign up has moved to ConnectCarolina, so be sure you check for new trainings regularly. Don’t miss out on new opportunities.

Several great (free) online resources are available to assist you with building, updating or targeting your résumé. Begin by logging into the Lynda.com learning platform through UNC’s single sign-on, and a wealth of tutorials awaits! Start here: http://software.sites.unc.edu/lynda/ and then search “resume.” “Designing a résumé” and “Personalizing the résumé” are great resources.

By Clare Counihan and Emily Gomez, members of the Education and Career Development Committee