The real value in attending a professional development session comes from what you do after the session. How you hold on to the motivation, inspiration and learnings from the professional development and apply them when you get back in to the workplace is the key to achieving real value from any professional development.
In last weeks blog I shared my experiences about attending multiple professional development sessions. After committing to and investing all that time in attending these professional development conferences and workshops I wanted to ensure I made the most of the learnings. In the past I’ve been guilty of slipping back in to work mode, putting the notes away in my desk draw and struggling to find the time to take action. This time I’ve done a few things differently and these small changes have made the world of difference in helping me action and implement ideas and change.
Have you been guilty of not taking full advantage of a professional development session by failing to take action afterwards? Here’s my teams tips on what we have done differently this time:
- The day after the RCSA Conference, the Inspire HQ team members who attended held a strategy session. We found a nice little table and chairs by the edge of the pool at the Sheraton and we went through speaker by speaker, concurrent session by concurrent session and discussed what value we had gained and what we had taken away from each speaker. We shared ideas about what we could apply at Inspire HQ that would improve the customer experience. We ended up with a list of actions that we all agreed on and we allocated those actions to team members and included timelines. These actions have now been added to our weekly team meeting agenda where we will each be held accountable for what we committed to do.
- At this strategy session we agreed that we couldn’t do everything. Instead, as a team we effectively prioritised what ideas would have the greatest impact. I tend to suffer from wanting to do it all but by working through a prioritisation and impact assessment process we were able to agree on key actions and goals. These longer term ideas are now listed on our ideas whiteboard in the office so we never forget them. We will regularly revisit them, reassess their priority over time and when the time is right we will action them. Or if priorities change we can simply remove them if they become no longer relevant.
- For professional development sessions that only one of our team attends, such as a B31 event in this instance, we have added a regular “Training” agenda item to our weekly team meeting. This training agenda item is for team members to share their learnings from any professional development they have attended the week prior. Team members are expected to provide an overview of the training, distribute notes, copies of handouts or slide presentations if applicable and share with the team what they took away, what they learnt and what could be applied to the business. It’s been great for creating a peer to peer knowledge sharing environment.
- The other thing I implemented (and it helped that I took a week of leave following the conference as it created the time to be able to do it) was to go back over all my notes from all my professional development sessions from the month. From here I created my own actions list of things to further explore and research. I downloaded all of the resources referenced in all of the presentations and reviewed those resources to see what I could take from them. Then I set some short term and long term goals. A colleague suggested creating tasks and calendar appointments in outlook to help me create the time to work on the business, on these different ideas and initiatives.
By doing these four key things I’m no longer feeling overwhelmed with ideas. I feel I have so much clarity about what I can and want to action and apply to the business and/or my role. The light bulb moment for me has been to realise the real value of a professional development session I need to:
- Create the time to review, prioritise, action and implement – get it in the diary
- Work as a team, when you have each other to hold you accountable you have a greater level of commitment to seeing it through
- Break the ideas down; what seems like a big, complex and impossible goal or action can be achieved by breaking it down in to small steps so it feels realistic and achievable.
Have you got some great tips and ideas that you use to get the most out of professional development sessions? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.
