Skills are one area of development that you can hone until its time for you to leave this world. There is no highest level of development that leaves you no room for further achievement. Sometimes things as simple as hammering away at a keyboard for a person who has to write or learning new ways of expression for a person who speaks in his professional calling(politics, sales and marketing, broadcasting) appear to be trivial and unimportant but the real fact of the matter is that you can take these skills to another height if only you just pay attention and do something about them. There are four stages of development of your skills whether they are new ones that you need to acquire or old ones you want to improve: 1. Plan a development strategy: It begins by you asking yourself: what can I do to improve? 2. You might decide on a course of study, reading or practical activity, depending on what is adequate for the skill level you intend to attain. Whatever it is, you intend to do to raise your levels, embrace it with enthusiasm and commit to it with all the determination you can muster. After a period of development, there has to be a test to show yourself whether you have actually learned what you want or whether you have hit the scale you are aspiring to. The test should be rigorous or pushing enough to expose the key areas and enable you to actually tell if you have moved from where you used to be to where you want to be. 3. After the test, you can now review your skills level and see if you have really moved up!
Here are 10 variables that Human Resource Managers love to adopt to assess their workforce on job related performance. The areas are also relevant in whichever area we find ourselves: Each level can be assessed on the three parameters of Low, Medium and High. So rate yourself!
1. Communication: How well do I communicate with the people I work with. How is my written and verbal communications? Are there areas that I need to touch on urgently? How often am I misunderstood?
2. Leadership: How many people can I influence for the good of the general activity of the organization? Please note that leadership here does not refer to positional leadership. We are referring to skills, and how they are rendered when there is a job to be done or a task to carry out. Your ability to carry people along effectively can be rated.
3.Team Management: Close to leadership, but it has more to do with knowing individuals who contribute to a major task and being able to make sure each individual contributes properly. Team managers should know their pool of talent very well and should be able to make sure that the major goal is achieved, even if there are differences among the team members.
4. Interviewing: Searching for information that is useful or pertinent to development or pursuance of work activity may require the ability to interview people and get the information required as quickly and easily as possible.
5.Negotiating: During conflicts, disagreements and misunderstandings, as well as purchases and resource management, negotiation is required to smoothen things out, and ensure that nothing goes out of hand. There are always two or more parties involved in negotiation. The ability to make sure that each party leaves the table with some measure of satisfaction is a skill that can be learned.
6. Consulting: Finding the expertise to solve a problem and ensuring that such knowledge is used effectively is a gift that also can be learned. You can engage in giving whatever expert advice is required in your field but remember it never ends, so you have work to do because there are always developments.
7.Financial Management: Not many people like to crunch figures. We often leave this for so called experts in the field. But everyone who is in any form of work needs to know how to balance an account. We do not refer to the technical stuff here, but the basics: Never spend more than you earn. Always have savings or money by the side no matter what. As the jargon goes: make sure that your income exceeds your expenditure. Many rich people have gone bankrupt because they did not go by these simple rules. This skill can be taken to the next level if you care to. We can learn where to invest our excess cash when we have it and use our negotiation skills to try and save money and go for options that are not too expensive, when it is possible.
8 Contracting and legal skills: You are wont to say leave this for the lawyers. But everyone needs to understand what a Memorandum of Understanding is all about. We may not know how to draw the details up but its important that we understand its components so that we can explain it to others, analyze it when necessary and disagree or agree to its contents before it is signed. We need lawyers and accountants to look for legal and financial loopholes, but nothing stops us from understanding it, especially when we are one of the parties involved.
9. IT: Information technology is being used for all manner of activity these days such that every key sector or area of life has been influenced by IT. The basic question is: how is IT being used in the area of my expertise? Do I know how? If I do, how well can I use it or cause it to be used in my domain?
10. Business applications are closely linked with IT. Some of them like Apps are being used to promote businesses,explain processes and link users to various companies around the world. Business applications are a boom in many parts of the world today. They can be used to enhance business activity in different ways. Which one application is applicable to you?
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