Professional And Personal Development Towards Career Goals: Self-Assessment

Identification of strengths and weaknesses for professional and personal development

Professional and personal development is inter-related factors that can support each other and help in long term development and to achieve career goals or objectives. However to ensure either professional or personal development, it is necessary to be able to identify owns strengths and weaknesses first. Identification of the strengths helps to understand the best ways to utilize them to acquire skills and competencies needed to achieve the target, while understanding the weaknesses helps to identify how best to overcome or address them (Agafonova et al., 2015; Chou et al., 2014).

I was able to utilize the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator test to find my personality type and Strengths Assessment tool in order to analyze my strengths and weaknesses. These helped me understand how far I was from achieving my career objective to become a manager. I also got help from my friend who was kind enough to assess my strengths, and helped me understand the perception of others on me. In the following report, analysis of my personality type from the Myers-Briggs personality type test as well as my strengths and weaknesses using the Strengths test tool is made, and compared to the results of the analysis done by my friend (Biswas?Diener et al., 2016). The results are then compared and the knowledge is used to understand my progression towards the career goals, how my skills fits the requirement  of the work I aspire to acquire, my current placement in the organization and how I can ensure self improvement through continuous improvement strategies.

Use of three naturally occurring data:

Conversations:

In personal or professional life conversation is an important skill. Conversations can be supported in many ways such as face to face, telephone or video conferencing. This allows communication of thoughts and ideas and helps to develop an understanding, share ideas or feedback, share results or just interacting with another person (Brink & Costigan, 2015).

Email:

Email is a written and electronic form of communication that is mostly used for professional and business purposes and to some extent for personal communication. Emails are effective because it provides a written documentation and helps to keep a track of the communication chain and can involve multiple recipients. Ideas, inputs or thoughts can be multicast to several people using emails, which make it very suitable for professional and business use (Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson, 2014; Thill & Bovée, 2015).

These are mostly corporate and professional tools that are regularly used be the employees in for different day to day activities, such as planners, schedulers or whiteboards, all of which can support communication and sharing of ideas (Simões & Mason, 2016).

Using Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator test I was able to find my personality type. My Personality type as indicated by the test was Extravert (56%), Intuitive (31%), Feelings (50%), Judging (9%), abbreviated as ENFJ (result added in the appendix). It shows that I prefer extraversion over introversion, Intuition over sensing, feeling over thinking, and judging over perceiving. Extraversion is the personality type that supports an outspoken, outgoing and social behavior, and individuals of such personality type prefer the company of people and have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Intuitiveness supports the behavior of making decisions based on feelings and individuals with such trait tend to show confidence in themselves and on others. Feeling is the personality type that supports the behaviors of making decisions based on subjective feeling, and can support innovativeness. Judging is a personality type supports the behavior of dealing with things in an orderly and arranged way, which can foster problem solving skills. Many of such strengths identified by the strengths test also supported my personality type. The ENFJ personality types tend to be charismatic, with great interpersonal skills, and a strong belief. They are also fast learners, and know when to appreciate others, have great organizational and problem solving skills (humanmetrics.com, 2018).

Analysis of personality type and strengths to achieve career objectives

Assessment of personal strengths and weaknesses as viewed by self and others:

Using the Strengths Assessment tool I was able to analyze my strengths and weaknesses. This is a vital step towards personal and professional development, since understanding the strengths and weaknesses can help to identify how to further develop the strengths and overcome the weaknesses. The self test revealed my key strengths as: Problem Solving Skills (100%), Communication (94%), Belief (94%) in self and others, Innovativeness (94%) and Visionary (88%). The weakness identified by the tool was a lack of Focus (44%). Also I found that my additional strengths included Strategic Thinking (81%), Integrity (81%), Purpose (75%), Resourcefulness (75%), Self Motivation (75%), Teamwork (75%), Risk Taking (75%), Leadership (75%), Curiosity (75%), Adaptability (69%), Balance (69%), Ambition (63%), Optimism (63%), Salesmanship (56%) and Determination (56%) (result added in the Appendix) (Cleary et al., 2017; richardstep.com, 2018).

Assessment of strengths and weaknesses: Effective problem solving skills requires significant amount and high detail of knowledge while taking decisions (Hesse et al., 2015). This skill also Innovativeness is a skill that helps to identify new solutions to existing challenges and creating new ideas from existing knowledge (Custódio et al., 2017). Visionary is the ability to foresee or project the future and thus helps to make decisions based on the vision. Belief is the skill that helps to maintain confidence in a situation and can turn a challenge into an opportunity. Focus is another important skill that helps to maintain orientation towards the goal or objective and prevents distractions or divergence from it (Whetten & Cameron, 2014). Communication skill is one of the most important strength, which helps to share thoughts and ideas more effectively and understand others (Srivastava, 2018).

I was able to take feedback from my friend on what he thought were my significant strengths and weaknesses. The Strengths Assessment tool was used by him to analyze my personality. According to his feedback, my Strengths included: Communication, Problem Solving and Belief, while my weaknesses were Teamwork and Focus. His results were almost similar to mine, which showed that his assessment was valid and correct. His feedback was that I needed to work on my focus, which I completely agreed to and also I needed to develop my team-working skills further (Whetten & Cameron, 2014).

My career objective is to develop leadership skills and competencies in order to become an efficient and effective manager. With such objective I was able to initiate by journey towards professional and personal development by gaining the key skills and competencies needed as a leader or manager in an organization. Before I started this journey, I lacked skills in communication, strategic thinking, problem solving and decision making. I already had strong beliefs and innovativeness and was able to understand that I needed to develop more skills to build my capacity and competency. The Briggs Myers and the Strengths Assessment test helped me understand that in my journey of professional and personal development, I was able to develop the skills of problem solving, communication and innovation (Chen & Rybak, 2017). I was able to measure my progress through the creation of a skill map, which listed the main skills and competencies needed to achieve my career goal, and identify which of them I was able to gain and which skill were still left to be developed. At each assessment I evaluated my strengths and weaknesses and added that to the skill map (Fernandez et al., 2015). This skill map helped is understood where I stood in my journey, and what should be my next objective. The skill map developed by me is shown below:

Effective communication tools to support personal and professional development

From the skill map above, I was able to identify my progress and acquisition of skills in my journey towards professional and personal development. It also helped me understand with other skills I need to focus on to be able to improve my competency and capacity as a manager or leader in an organization. Through the series of self assessment, I would be able to measure and monitor my progress and understand how much my skills and abilities fir with the needs of the job profile. From the second assessment I was able to understand that I develop some of the most important skills needed to work as a manager or leader in any organization (Raaijmakers et al., 2018). This helped me realize that my current skills are competencies are suitable for such a job, and I am already prepared to take up such responsibilities. Such consideration made me realize that my strengths proved to be a good fit for the organization I intend to work for. It also helped me understand how I can develop my skills further to ensure a perfect fit for the organization (Fernandez et al., 2015).

My current placement in the organization as an executive helped me understand organizational theories and concepts. Through my professional practice, I was able to inculcate the important skills needed to become a manager. I was able to do so by studying extensively, observing the behaviors and actions of other managers and leaders, and using self reflective and critical analytical approaches to analyze my own skills. Through the analysis of my strengths and weaknesses, I was able to understand that my skills and competencies have developed my capacity to take on more responsibilities than the position of an executive (Chen & Rybak, 2017). At such a juncture, I believe that I can work as a manager, and my current job role underutilizes my strengths. Hence I believe that I am misplaced in the organization. I think that I would be able to do a much better work; I am given the opportunity to work in a managerial position, which would allow me to utilize my abilities in a better way, and in the process develop my skills and competencies further. Such a perspective can also be supported through the results of the Strengths Assessment tool that showed that I have developed the important skills needed to be an effective and efficient manager (Raaijmakers, et al., 2018).

Self improvement can occur through the development of knowledge, capacity, competency and character through self effort. Self improvement can help in continuous development as it helps to continuously keep investing on self, learning new skills continuously, improve self awareness and continuously try to overcome the weaknesses while further developing the strengths (Armenta et al., 2016).

Continuous improvement is the ongoing process of constant evaluation and development, through which overall improvement can occur through incremental steps of small improvements and adjustments (Hutchins, 2016). Continuous improvement reflects upon the idea that incremental improvements are necessary and is influenced by certain principles. These principles include: a) Improvements are dependent on incremental changes instead of major inventions or paradigm shifts. b) Employees can have valuable ideas or insights that can allow incremental changes. c) Incremental chances can be cheaper to implement than large change. d) Employees can take the ownership and accountability of small changes and improvement. e) Improvement is a reflective process. f) Improvements can be measured and potentially repeated (Singh & Singh, 2015).

The Kaizen model incorporates several aspects that allows continuous improvement towards what is good (Zen) through change (kai). These aspects include feedback, efficiency, and evolution. I believe that I can incorporate this model to ensure continuous improvement of my strengths and capacity to achieve my career objectives (Cherrafi et al., 2018).

Conclusion:

From the report above I was able to understand that my key strengths were problem solving skills, communication, belief in self and others. Innovative and vision. I also found that I was a strategic thinker, adaptable and have the ability to motivate others. These strengths were identified using the Briggs-Myers and Strengths Test. Using a self created skill map, I was able to chart and measure my progression towards the career objective to be a good and efficient manager. I also was able to understand that my skills were a good fit for the professional and personal competencies needed of an efficient and effective managerial role. I also think that my current role is underutilizing my skills, and I feel misplaced in the organization. However, I feel confident that through continuous improvement I can further develop my strengths, competencies and skills and overcome my weaknesses and achieve my career goal.

References:

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