Improving Your Skills by Developing Your Weaknesses

There are a number of ways in which you can start to work on areas of weakness. In drawing up a plan for your personal development, it can be helpful to include several different methods to address problems. This helps to maintain interest.

Options include

Formal courses or learning opportunities, whether leading to qualifications or not;

More informal learning experiences such as reading, mentoring or shadowing (read more about Learning from mentoring on this page: Learning from Mentoring);

Applying your formal learning deliberately in a particular situation, to see what happens; and

Direct learning from your own experience, through a process of reflection (read more about Reflective learning on this page: Reflective Practice) and expertise transfer.

Which you choose, and when, will depend on many factors, including financial implications, because formal courses and qualifications usually cost money, and also the value that you think you are likely to get out of them.

Expertise Transfer

Expertise transfer is the process of drawing on your existing areas of expertise and learning to apply them in slightly different ways. In effect, it is a way of making sense of your challenges by using what you already know from another setting.

The key to expertise transfer is to identify something that you are really good at. Many people, especially when they are finding something difficult, find it hard to identify anything at which they are ‘expert’. But in this case, it means something:

• That you can do relatively easily;
• Where you do not need to be supervised; and
• That you like or, at worst, feel comfortable doing.
• It is helpful to identify something that has several stages to it, rather than just one.

Learning from Mistakes

One of the most powerful ways to learn and develop is from making mistakes. While nobody would advocate deliberately setting out to do things wrong, mistakes happen to everyone, especially if you are prepared to take risks and try something new.

You can either treat mistakes as things to be hushed up and never spoken about again, or as learning opportunities. Making mistakes:

• Gives you a chance to do things wrong, and then reflect about how you could and/or should have done them differently; and
• Can, if you are lucky, uncover real truths about good ways of working and improve relationships.