Personal Development

1 Personal development & career planning

This is about self-understanding and using essential skills for career building. Workshops can be designed around the needs of defined groups, such as doctoral research students or research staff. We explore with participants the ways in which they can understand their own skills and preferences, identify and express their aspirations and how they can sell themselves to prospective employers, search effectively for job vacancies and develop a personal development plan and act upon it. This is about setting personal objectives that relate to developing skills and achieving goals.
Participants are introduced to the concepts of action learning as a subsequent complement to this workshop.The normal format for this workshop occupies one day, but we will design different formats to meet client’s requirements.

2 Action Learning

One outcome of participating in the personal development and career building workshop can be the building of action learning sets. These can be an effective way for a group of people to work together in addressing issues they encounter during their work or study: sets are peer-driven and exist as long as the members wish.

We can help groups set up their own learning set and facilitate the first few sessions if required. This approach lends itself particularly well to an academic environment and we have assisted groups in such sets to develop their more generic interpersonal skills and also to work on more focused activities like academic writing which can be particularly valuable for those who are preparing their doctoral thesis.

3 One-to-one support

We offer several programmes that support the personal and career development of the individual - please see our One-to-One Support pages.