Continued Professional Development: How To Push Past a Dead End

Professional development can take many forms but if there’s one sure fire way to bring it to a halt, it’s a difficult, time-consuming, and ultimately dead end job.

Dead end jobs aren’t just bad because they offer no promise of advancement. They’re a problem because they take up the time you could be spending looking for new jobs.

In this article, we’d like to explore some more accessible types of continued professional development, the tools you’ll need, and how a CPD mentor could be the answer.

Reviewing Your Options

The first step to any major change in life, be it personal or professional, is research. Put simply, you have to know which types of continued professional development are available to you. More than that you have to understand those options to know whether or not they’ll be sustainable alongside your job.

In practice there are three factors that affect your ability to develop professionally: Aspiration, Inspiration, and pragmatism. Put simply, you need to have a goal, you need to feel inspired to achieve that goal, and you need to have the practical resources that will get you there.

As we’ve already established, the biggest resource standing between most people and continued professional development is time. Learning new skills, applying to new jobs, and picking up qualifications along the way all takes time – time many people simply can’t afford.

When reviewing your options you need to find a goal that you can sustainably work towards. Either that means finding a way to make extra time or finding a goal that you can work towards in very small increments. That said, there is a third option that could make achieving your goal a lot easier.

Working With a CPD Mentor

Of course, it should come as no surprise that, here at Career Navig8r, we believe the solution to most problems is proper mentoring. A good mentor can do wonders for your professional development, often sidestepping huge amounts of time and effort on your part.

The reality is that much of the time people spend on career development is spent looking for information or trying to make the right contacts. A mentor can help you sidestep both problems.

On the one hand, they can direct you towards the information you actually need and help to tailor your learning in a practical way so you can make the most of the hours you put in. At the same time they can introduce you to their network of contacts, putting you in touch with the people you need to speak to whilst also teaching you how to communicate pragmatically.

The Importance of Iteration

When trying to pull yourself out of a dead end in your career, it’s also important to remember that you might not get it right the first time. There are a lot of jobs out there and a lot of paths you can take. Even within industries there are usually countless directions you can pursue and that’s only getting more true as new jobs are constantly created.

A dead end in your career can feel like a nightmare situation but with the right mindset it can also be an amazing opportunity for growth. It’s a chance to stop, take a breath, and consider where you want to go from here.

As you explore the possibilities of continued professional development you can find new interests, pick up new passions, and discover whole new subjects you might previously not have taken an interest in.

This kind of experimental approach can certainly be risky and nobody likes taking risks with their career. That said, if you really want to push out of your current comfort zone then it’s probably worth taking the occasional risk.

Finding Tools For Continued Professional Development

Although we’ve talked about mentoring as a tool, it’s also worth noting that there are countless other tools out there to help you push further with your career. From community resources where people share their own knowledge and experience, to educational programs designed to help you pick up skills and change jobs, there are lots of resources out there to help if you go looking for them.

If there’s one thing you can do to really set you ahead of the crowd at any stage in your career it’s to always embrace opportunities. Look for the chances that will let you grow – whether that’s taking on a new project at work or reading up on a subject you’ve always been curious about. You’d be amazed how often following your passions can lead you to real career paths.