Find the right competency development
How do you figure out how and in what direction you should advance your skills?
There are tons of options for professional competency development – from courses and conferences to online learning, videos, podcasts, and peer groups.
Get help choosing your professional competency development here.
What is competency development?
In Denmark, most workplaces prioritise courses and competency development by sending their employees on conferences, courses and the like. Competence development will allow you to gain new competences or update your knowledge within a given area.
Examples of continuing education include:
- Courses
- Conferences
- Peer groups or experience groups
- Mentoring programmes
- Professional communities
- Lectures or presentations
- Theme days
- Self-study using books, videos, podcasts or similar resources
- Online courses
- On-the-job training
When should I think about continuing education and competency development?
You should think about continuing education throughout your career – regardless of whether you are a recent graduate, in the middle of your career and busy with everyday life, or in the latter stages of your career and about to retire within a few years.
Continuing education and competency development is about focusing on
- your job satisfaction, so that you are happy and your employer can retain you as best as possible
- your market value, so that you remain an attractive employee for both your current and any future employers.
The labour market is changing rapidly, and your skills need to be kept up to date.
How to stay focused on your development
Why should I focus on continuing education and skills development?
When you focus on developing your skills, you can influence the direction of your career and shape the working life you dream of.
- Do you dream of new and more challenging tasks?
- Is there a particular type of task you would like to tackle in the future?
- Do you want to specialise or become a project manager or leader?
- Are there areas of personal development where you need to improve?
By targeting your skills at the areas that interest you most, you open doors to exciting opportunities and create a meaningful career path for yourself.
In this way, you take control of your career. You do not let chance determine your path, or your manager's wishes for your development, but make conscious choices based on your own wishes and goals.
6 STEPS TO FINDING THE RIGHT COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT FOR YOU
1 Identify your weaknesses
Identify the areas where you need to develop both professionally and personally.
Take a systematic approach to gaining an overview of your skills and weaknesses.
Also think about what you enjoy working with most. This will make you more aware of what you are good at and what you enjoy doing, and you will become better at putting it into words.
You are also guaranteed to discover that you can do more than you think.
Find your skills with IDA's competency profile
2 Identify your strengths
How do you find out how and in what direction you should improve your competences? Start by listing your tasks:
- What are you not good at and what don’t you really want to work with anyway?
- Are there tasks you are good at, but you find boring?
- Are there tasks you’re both good at and find interesting? These are your so-called unrealised strengths
- Are there tasks that you currently find difficult, but which are challenging and interesting?
Focus on the last bullet. This is where you should find out whether you should improve your competences with continuing training to get more interesting and developing tasks.
If you map your tasks and look at which ones you like, you can take the next step and look at what works well or not so well about the tasks and what you find interesting about them.
Is it the task itself, the collaboration in the team or the reason for the task? This provides a good basis for the type of continuing training you should look at and for how to talk to your manager about where you want to develop and learn more.
3 Think about where you want to go in your career
Part of finding the right continuing education programme is also about looking at the direction you want your career to take.
A course cannot, on its own, move your career in a particular direction. However, if you grow your skills in, for instance, a management or a specialist field, it will lay the groundwork for you to take on tasks in a new area, allowing you to point your career development in that direction.
It could be tricky to figure out which direction you should develop in. You can look for inspiration among IDA's courses, peer groups or professional communities, where you can network, hear about other people's careers and find out what's going on in their fields. Maybe there's something exciting for you there too?
You can also talk to a career counsellor or competency advisor at IDA if you have an idea for a direction or area you would like to develop in, but need help to concretise it and figure out how to approach it.
Get help from a career counsellor
Get help from a competency advisor
4 Choose continuing education with both your heart and your head
Choosing professional development with both your heart and your head is a balancing act, because you have to balance strategically wise choices with your interests.
Consider what it would be wise for you and the company to learn right now and what the labour market demands both now and in the long term. But also consider what you find exciting.
If you choose further training based solely on market value and what the company needs, you risk your motivation being low because it is not really interesting.
Conversely, if you choose something you find interesting but which is not relevant to the company, you risk learning something you cannot implement and use afterwards.
5 Remember personal skills
It is not enough to be professionally strong. In almost all jobs, you also need to be able to collaborate, plan, present and communicate – and these are also skills that must be learned and practised.
It can be sensitive to ask your manager for further training in personal skills that you lack, such as presentation techniques, effective planning or networking, because it may seem as if there is something wrong with you as a person. But personal skills are important for your well-being and your professional success.
6 Find relevant courses and training for you
Do you need to be certified? Do you want to specialise further professionally? Do you want to get started with project management or leadership?
Is there continuing education available close to you, or do you have to travel far? Is it best to take physical courses or asynchronous online learning? Is the knowledge you need only available abroad? And how do you know if a course provider is of the right quality?
Choose the most effective learning methods to develop the skills you want.
Continuing education and further training are not just courses. They can include online courses, e-learning, books, podcasts, workshops, events, peer groups or mentoring relationships. Find methods that suit your learning style and schedule.
Remember that it is important to find a balance between skills development and work so that you avoid overloading yourself.
No matter what skills you want to strengthen, continuing education can be a bit of a jungle to navigate.
IDA's skilled competency advisors have a good overview of courses and the skills market, and they can help you find your next course among professional private and public course and continuing education providers.
Book a free competency consultation
Talk to your manager about continuing education
For many, the most difficult step is presenting their desire for continuing education to their manager.
Get tips for the conversation here
Get help with skills development from IDA
IDA has many different skills development offerings, ranging from networking to mentoring programmes, courses, conferences, events, webinars and podcasts.
