How Do I Advance My Career? - Mike Cohn

People often ask me what they can do to advance.
Some who ask are looking specifically to advance their careers. Others are looking to just improve in some way, perhaps knowing that improving often does lead to career advancement. Still others want to improve in ways completely unrelated to work.
I want to share two tips that can form a framework for advancing yourself.
First: treat your own personal development as you’d treat organizational improvements. Think about something you wish you could do (or know) but can’t right now. Then identify the one most useful step to move you toward that. Think of it like gap analysis for personal development.
Second: set monthly goals for yourself in two areas: performance and learning.
Performance goals are things you want to do. Learning goals represent knowledge or skills you want to gain.
Don’t go overboard and write goals for everything in your life. Just start each month with one to three goals of each type.
My performance and learning goals this month are a good example. I’m working on a new writing project so my goals are directed toward that. They are:

• Write for at least thirty minutes a day on eighteen days in July
• Write for five days in a row sometime during the month
• Read two particular books related to my project

The first two are performance goals. I’m so busy with many things but I am trying to get back into the habit of writing daily.
To make that happen, I looked at what else I have to do in July and decided on the two performance goals at the top of my list.
The last goal is a learning goal. To ensure I know all that’s needed for this project, I want to read those books.
Nothing about this is fancy. But identifying and resolving gaps as well as giving myself at least one learning and one performance goal each month has helped me advance my career and succeed with agile.

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