The First Step for Career Success For Validation and Regulatory Compliance Professionals
Every day you send emails, have meetings, present reports and many other day-to-day tasks. In this article I outline “The First Step for Career Success” that will help you turn those daily tasks into opportunities for career growth.
To successfully implement, use and maintain computer systems, the regulatory, clinical, and IT professionals working in the healthcare, clinical trial, biopharmaceutical, and medical device sectors must gain relevant knowledge.
CoursWorx through Compliance Connect provides career success tips that help you turn those daily tasks into opportunities for career growth.
Take The First Step To Advance Your Career
The ability to adapt to new technology, people and ideas is essential for advancing your career. Employers look for the flexibility it takes to adapt to new technology, collaborations and philosophies. Meeting the goals you’re striving for requires a willingness to make changes when necessary.
In recent years, much has been made of soft skills, or transferable skills, that allow professionals like you to succeed in a variety of roles. As skills gaps widen and the demand for various skills changes, however, you and your employer can benefit from a focus not only on transferable skills but also on skills related to your core career focus.
he First Step for Career Success For Validation and Regulatory Compliance Professionals
The latter, known as adjacent skills, include both transferable and technical skills.
As skills gaps widen and the demand for various skills changes, however, you and your employer can benefit from a focus not only on transferable skills but also on skills related to your core career focus.
The latter, known as adjacent skills, include both transferable and technical skills.
Developed effectively, these skills can help workers adapt to the fast-paced change that characterizes today’s business world. Adjacent skills are skills related to a skill or competency you already have.
Often, they’re skills that are not targeted in job descriptions or in job-related education, but that play an essential role in enhancing your ability to fully understand your role and perform it more effectively.
What Are the Right Skills
The first step to finding the right adjacent skills to develop for a career pivot is quite straightforward—what do you want to learn? If that feels like a big question to answer all at once, follow a process similar to the one used to discover transferable skills.
CEO and Founder of GreatOnTheJob Jodi Glickman laid out a helpful system for discovering these skills in her LinkedIn Learning course on Leveraging Your Transferable Skills to Drive Your Career – https://lnkd.in/eR_XJDTH.
Glickman recommended you start the process by asking yourself four questions:
What are your strengths?
What do you excel at in your current role?
What do you enjoy? This is NOT the same as what you’re good at! “What do you do and the time just flies by, you don’t notice the clock,” Glickman asked, “or what would you do as a favor to a friend?”
What gives you energy? What skills make you feel like you’re “in the zone” and get you excited to keep going?
Instead of letting your resume define you, leverage your transferable skills.
“If you feel at the end of the day that you have nothing left to give to yourself or to others, you are in a role that is energy-depleting,” Glickman explained. “You’re probably not playing to your strengths and there are probably ways that you can leverage your transferable skills in a more positive and impactful way.”
What are you known for? “What do friends and family, peers and colleagues come to you for advice on?”
Another Dimension To Adjacent Skills
Following Glickman’s process to uncover adjacent skills requires adding another dimension to these questions. You’re not necessarily trying to discover skills you already have in this case, but skills related to the skills you already have that you would like to learn.
To discover these skills, follow up each of these questions with a “why?”
Unpack the deeper reasons why you feel the way you feel about each aspect of your job, and especially the parts that you excel at, enjoy, and feel energized by. What is it about these skills that work for you? Are there any adjacent skills that you think could elicit the same reaction from you?
One of the easiest ways to identify adjacent skills is to take one step up the ladder – what category of skills, or “skill cluster,” does a particular one fall into – and then look for other skills that also nest under that category. For example, maybe you’re really strong at goal-setting around objectives and key results (which happens to be the most popular CoursWorx Learning course).
You could zoom this out to Leadership & Management as a skill cluster, then pursue adjacent skills like Coaching or Strategic Thinking to broaden your horizon of opportunity.
Instead of letting your resume define you, leverage your transferable skills to create new job opportunities and career paths. Uncover and highlight your strengths and talents and connect your transferable skills to job openings to ultimately promote yourself.
Using Adjacent Skills to Forge Your New Career Success
Once you’ve identified which adjacent skills you’re interested in utilizing in your new career path, look for careers that use them. You can use LinkedIn’s Career Explorer tool to find career paths associated with the skills you’re interested in and start using CoursWorx to develop these skills.
A First Step for Career Success –
- Even if you don’t have all the skills you need to start the career path you want, don’t let that dissuade you from taking the next step forward.
- Learning new skills is never a waste of time, and if they’re adjacent skills, you might find you pick them up faster than you thought.
How to Hire for Adjacent Skills
Most companies understand that the pace of global change drives a constant demand for updated and expanded skill sets. Understanding what’s changing in the workforce, however, doesn’t automatically arm companies with the knowledge of how to respond.
Hiring is one of the popular ways for companies to address skills gaps. About 66 percent of companies that faced a skills gap in the past five years resolved it by making a new hire. Hiring managers and human resources professionals might have once gone directly to the source, asking team leaders or front-line workers what skills were needed on the job.
You need a data-driven approach to understand the evolving industry and competitive skill sets, skill profiles, and shifting workforce dynamic
Today, however, relying solely on the view of the skills needed today is likely to cause skills gaps to persist in the long run.
Instead, “you need a data-driven approach to understand the evolving industry and competitive skill sets, skill profiles, and shifting workforce dynamics — especially given limited budgets for recruiting and training,” says Scott Engler, vice president, advisory, Gartner.
By leveraging available data, companies can better identify which skills are over – or underrepresented in their teams and within the organization as a whole. Data-driven approaches can also identify adjacent skills that fit employees for cross-training into new positions.
Take the First Step For Career Success to build and leverage your professional skills to build the career path you’ve always wanted by subscribing to Compliance Connect. Our weekly updates are available to members of Compliance Connect.