Professional Development Plan - Exercise

Time to Create Your Plan!

Now that you've had a chance to review the previous lesson on Professional Development, it's time that we create our plan. This plan will be due by the end of the class period.

Please keep in mind that your plan doesn't need to be complete, nor does it need to be perfect. We just want to get a general idea of what you're thinking of approaching, and how you'll approach your study during the next section.

Utilize the previous lesson to scaffold what things to consider. In addition, you are welcome to peruse the Archetypes that have been given as examples of skills to research that appear in the weekend's homework, or come up with your own combination of skills that you think fit within your interests and career goals best.

Step One - Self-assessment

Review the lesson identifying your skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

You may wish to:

• Revisit your original SWOT analysis
• Create a new one, or make modifications to the previous submission
• Examine your strengths, and list them
• Examine where you feel you may need improvement, and list them

Step Two - Identify Skills Relevant to Your Career

We've given you a list of skills we've found are currently appearing in job posts within the development spectrum, and you are welcome to take notes from that list. Otherwise, you may identify skills on your own depending on the career path you're hoping to pursue.

You might list/explore:

• Tools and technologies you don’t currently know, but are interested in learning.
• Skills employers are asking for things that you haven’t learned yet on job posts.
• Pick a specialization you’re interested in, like dev ops, information security, or game development and research what skills those roles require.
• Look for what’s popular. You might find that the tech industry looks very different from one city’s tech sector to the next.

Whatever method you use, make a list of any skills or tools that might be relevant to your personal development and make you a more competitive candidate.

Step Three - Narrow It Down

As discussed in the previous lesson, use the following items to narrow down your list of skills to peruse.

This list is not exhaustive, but we’ll talk about some of the most common criteria and how you might use them in this process.

• Professional goals
• Purpose
• Industry research
• Skill gaps
• Personal interest
• Time

Remember that you'll have several weeks to pursue these skills and interests. We will be working with you continuously throughout this section to give feedback about your plan, and we can change course or your plan at any time. The main goal is that we want to see you start working towards your goals.

Step Four - Put Everything Together

As a recap of the previous lesson, this step is meant to ensure all the components of your plan are in place for each skill or goal you have. Here are some things you will want to include:

• A goal with a measurable outcome: This might be different from one plan to the next, but the principle is always the same. What do you want to be able to do by the end of the time period you’re planning for? How do you know you have succeeded? If you decide to spend your capstone class learning Java, your goal might be to be comfortable enough with the language to work independently in it in a job setting. Measuring your success could be something like building an application with it. No matter how you do it, you’ll want something to be able to see for yourself that this was time well spent!
• Specific milestones: What steps do you need to take to reach your goal? As an example, let’s look at the C#/.NET class you just completed. You went through curriculum and completed code reviews dedicated to things like test-driven development and many-to-many relationships. The tools, technologies, and other skills you decide to focus your energy on should be similarly broken down.
• Resources: Where are you planning to source information from to learn the skill you’re trying to build. You don’t have to know all the details, and this doesn’t mean you can’t branch out later, but you should have a jumping off point that is similar to the way you’ve used the Epicodus curriculum so far. For your long-term career success, reliably being able to find resources to teach yourself new skills are going to be just as important as learning those new skills.
• A schedule: Think of this like your syllabus. In fact, the template provided in the next section is directly modeled off the syllabus. What do you need to accomplish every week or every day to finish successfully?

Step Five - Draft!

As a reminder, we've made this example that you can copy: Example plan

Otherwise, you're welcome to format your plan how you see fit.

In the top section of our example learning plan, we’ve added a space where you’ll put in your goal, milestones, and resources.

Next, you’ll want to add in a weekly schedule. As a reminder, all Career Service events are in the example. Whether or not you feel good or uncertain about your crafted schedule, your instructor or advisor (or both!) will help guide you with feedback.

In our example plan, we used the Coursera Object Oriented Programming in Java course.

In the first section, you’ll want to note what you expect to have done by the end of the week. Then, for each day, map out what steps you need to take to complete everything on your list on time. Build this out for the total duration of your plan, which in this particular case, will be the nine weeks of the Capstone course.

Please know that allocating funds for external lessons is not necessary! There are many free resources, and this will be true for all your extended learning in the future. You will never stop learning in this field.

Submit Your Plan

Submit your plan to Epicenter, under the Capstone Course. During this week and following weeks, staff will meet with you and review. These are living documents, and goals that you don't meet don't necessarily constitute a failure. This will be a learning process!