personal development

The Future of Professional Development – USQ Mini-courses – update

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See previous article. USQ UpSkill background The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has established UpSkill ‘Professional learning for the 21st Century’ – with practical online mini-courses. Currently, there are business, management, marketing and education courses, and more are being developed. USQ is a recognised leader in online and blended education and has established a reputation … Read more

The Future of Professional Development – Mini-courses

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In today’s world professionals are busy, yet want to progress their professional practice and their career, while balancing life and work. Professional development opportunities are limited and often difficult to translate what you learn to your day-to-day work. Graduate qualifications for transport professionals are also very limited, especially for those outside the catchment of university … Read more

Do you focus on your strengths?

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Let me ask you a question … as a professional are you focused on developing and expanding your strengths? The traditional approach, that we have all been told from a young age, is to work on and improve your weaknesses. Many people spend a huge amount of time trying to get better in lots of … Read more

Trait four of a super-professional: CLARITY

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Clarity is the fourth in the series of key characteristics of a ‘super’ professional. In previous articles, I described resilience, autonomy, and agility. Let us explore clarity. Clarity means clearness of purpose and primarily results from simplicity, that is, simple rules, processes and solutions. Complexity may result from well-intentioned, incremental additions to rules and processes, … Read more

How agile a professional are you?

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A previous article referred to the four traits of a ‘super’ professional: resilience, autonomy, agility and clarity. In the previous two articles I described the characteristics of resilience and autonomy. In this article, three of four in the series, let us explore agility. This is the ability to move quickly and easily and changing direction if … Read more

As a professional do you have autonomy?

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In the previous article on resilience I referred to the four traits of a ‘super’ professional: resilience, autonomy, agility and clarity. This article explores what autonomy means for professionals — you want more autonomy and control of your professional practice, your work and your career. Autonomy means being able to make decisions independently, without having to refer to someone else, to … Read more

Are you a resilient professional?

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There are four traits of a ‘super’ professional: resilience, autonomy, agility and clarity. So let us start with resilience, which means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty, or adversity or setbacks – or in one word ‘toughness’. Dean Becker from Adaptiv Learning Systems found that the level of resilience a person exhibits determines their success, far more … Read more

How to find time for your professional development

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You need to make building capability a priority in your professional life.

Do you want to become more marketable and be able to win that promotion or new job or get selected for the best projects?

Then you have to take time to develop your knowledge and learn new skills. But do you struggle to make the time for personal development, even though it’s on your ‘to do’ list?

The urgent or important tasks that need to be done crowd out your work day, and beyond! It is difficult to avoid being distracted by those urgent things on your list.

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Think lattice, not ladder career development

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What should be the career development strategy for technical professionals?

A major challenge facing transport agencies is being able to readily obtain the required skills and expertise to plan, design, implement, operate and maintain smart transport infrastructure and services.

The public sector is still the predominant transport system owner and operator in Australia, although increasingly the private sector is providing infrastructure and contracted services ranging from road maintenance, to provision of bus and train services.

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