Ever wonder how you can methodically upskill yourself? Find out here in this article!

Are you struggling to get started on how to upskill yourself this year? You want to start the process off but find yourself procrastinating and dreading the thought of taking on something new.

You are not the only one feeling this way, so don’t be too hard on yourself. This article will get you to start thinking and planning for your upskilling journey ahead. Let’s get started!

Step #1: Identify your strengths and weaknesses

This is probably the most important step that you need to consider for yourself before you embark on your journey to upskill and improve yourself. Like Sun Tzu once said, if you know yourself and your enemy, you need not fear the result of hundred battles. The enemy in this case could be you not taking a hard and fair look at yourself.

Identifying your strengths and weaknesses takes a lot of effort and time, but you can start by recalling past events where you remember profoundly you did well in certain tasks or projects. What specifically did you do well? What was the feedback from your manager or your mentor? What skills did you utilize the most? Reflect and write them down on a piece of paper every detail of these events. Contextualize these experiences as something that you should keep doing and to be more consistent at.

Correspondingly, reflect back on past events where you did not perform up to mark. This is more tricky as you have a tendency to put most of the blame and faults on your character that you interpret as something fundamental that you can’t change. First of, change your mindset on your weaknesses to thinking that no one is perfect and that skills are developed through learning from failures and persistence in taking that next step forward constantly, however small. It is better to fail and acknowledge your weaknesses, and try again. Secondly, ask yourself the same questions as above but in the opposite way. Finally, write them down and emphasize your ACTION PLANS for each, and not how bad the weaknesses are.

Its important also that you don’t overestimate yourself through your strengths and become overconfident in them as it will ironically prevent you from further improving yourself. After obtaining your strengths and weaknesses outlined, you can then proceed to investigate the overall conditions of your industry that you are working in.

Step #2: Research on trends of the industry that you are working in

After obtaining a good look at your strengths and weaknesses, procced to research on the trends of the industry that you are working in. You need to identify potential disruptions that could affect your employability in the job market.

In a general sense, investing in skills that relates to information technology is a safe bet in today’s world of increased digitization and automation. It helps you to cope also with the changing working culture and arrangements of working from home.

Look out for change of technologies in your industry specifically ones that aims to automate the current tasks and processes that you are involved in. For example, the emergence of e-commerce has meant that demand for physical retail stores are declining and that companies are reducing their physical sales workforce.

However, companies are changing their business paradigm of focusing instead on the experiences of their buyers in their physical stores. They are organizing more events that increase the interactions of customers, enhancing their experience at their stores. Hence, you will need to invest in communication and event planning skills that improve your interaction with customers if you are in sales.

This is just one example of how you can use the information on the trends in industry in deciding what you can upskill in to adapt to the ever changing environment. Apply the same thought process to the industry that you are working in. Behind every disruptive trend, there are opportunities that you can take advantage of.

Step #3: Choose and budget for upskilling education and courses

Once you get a good hold on your own strengths an weaknesses and identify the potential gap in your skills in light for trends in your industry, choose the courses and education that you can upskill that addresses your gap currently and the future.

Discuss this with your spouse or your manager/mentor to obtain valuable feedbacks on your future development plans. After all, this doesn’t just affect you but also your spouse in terms of family development planning and your company’s overall performance.

Proceed to then budget for these courses financially where there a myriad of education options that you can choose from. More and more free courses are being offered online, which you can take advantage of but lacks quality. Courses that are not free, in turn offer better quality but might be costly for the people that are not earning enough to afford them. If you decide for a comprehensive education, you can opt to further your education from universities that have increasingly offered their classes online and at a more affordable rate. Engage a licensed financial planner to better plan your budget and finances.

You should also be moderate in deciding how many upskilling courses you are taking as this is not just a financial investment, but also time. Most of you will probably be working when you are pursuing these upskilling courses. It’s important to not get burned out by your many commitments and hence, you need to properly plan a manageable and consistent time schedule for yourself.

Step #4: Plan a manageable and consistent time schedule

After choosing and setting aside a budget for your upskilling courses, you can come up with a time schedule that suits your needs and requirements. It is important that you don’t overburden yourself with your current commitments.

Theoretically, the best time to upskill yourself is after work and during the weekends. You need to take into account that you need time for yourself to rest and recover, and that you have family commitments.

Realistically, if you finish work at 6pm, take about an hour to get back from work, and another hour for dinner with family, you have about 4 hours left for the night. Factoring in time for yourself to rest and family, you are left with about 2 hours to learn about the upskilling courses.

Hence, you have about 10 hours from the weekdays to engage in this but normally Friday nights are meant for meeting up with your friends and spending time with your family. And depending on your commitments, Saturdays are normally reserved for a  complete day of rest from anything work-related. That leaves Sunday for some time to learn up on the upskilling courses. You shouldn’t spend more than 6 hours learning about it in a single day.

Thus, you have about 14 to 16 hours in a week realistically to engage in upskilling if you don’t need to work overtime. You need to take into account that everyone is not perfect so there will be some days that you will not be able to spend time on upskilling.

Step #5: Apply what you learn in work consistently

This is a very important point that you should actively consider in your work. For any upskilling courses that you take, there needs to be tangible results from it that you can apply in work.

After all, knowledge without application defeats the purpose of education and upskilling. Spend at least 1 hour a day applying what you have learned the previous day or week thinking about how to apply them to your current work and personal life.

It doesn’t matter how small the application is. What matters is that you continually find a purpose to what you are learning and applications of that reinforces your understanding and motivation of learning.

Try writing down also your experience of applying what you learn in a journal to take stock of their effectiveness and your own development. If what you learn improve the speed at which you do things by 5% to 10%, that is already good enough.

Conclusion

2021 is probably the best year to upskill yourself  with the availability of affordable courses and incentives for upskilling. You can start the process off by first identifying your strengths and weaknesses, researching what are the trends in your industry, choosing and budgeting for upskilling, plan a time schedule for it, and finally apply the lessons that you learned in your work and personal life.

 

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Let us know below in the comments how you are planning to upskill yourself!