What Busy Professionals Can Do to Boost Their Career Skills for Post-Pandemic Growth

— Written in partnership with Tina Martin at Ideaspired.com —

If you’re a busy professional with little time to spare, these resources below will help you to boost your career skills for post-pandemic growth — all without falling behind on your current duties and responsibilities. In fact, you’ll even learn how to better manage your time and become a more effective and efficient business leader. Read on to get started!

 Learn on the Side

Even as a busy business leader, there are so many convenient ways to further your education and boost your career skills if you’ll be pursuing new job opportunities post-pandemic.

●      Find out which skills will be needed in a post-pandemic world and start mastering them with online classes and tutorials. Some of the best online learning platforms for business professionals include 360 Training, Udemy, Khan Academy, Coursera, and Skillshare.

●      Earn an online degree. For example, you can find flexible bachelor’s or master’s degree programs in K-12 teaching, business management, health leadership, or data analytics.

●      Find and attend a SCORE workshop or webinar. For example, you can learn start, grow or sell your business. Topics range from human resources and customer relations to accounting, marketing, and operations.

●      Apply to Hervé Da Costa’s leadership acceleration program.

 Improve Your Time Management Skills

 Time management is an essential soft skill that all business leaders must possess in order to excel in their careers.

●      Learn how to manage your time, prioritize tasks, and delegate successfully.

●      Use productivity tools and apps such as Airtable, Notion, Front, and Double.

●      Find out what other CEOs are doing to stay focused, motivated, and in control of their time.

●      Practice mindfulness to quiet the mind and boost mental clarity.

Lead More Effectively and Efficiently

These resources will help you to become a more effective and efficient leader.

●      Get the Free Leadership Acceleration Training available from Hervé.

Read 10 business leadership books, including “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.

●      Listen to 10 of the best TED Talks for leaders.

●      Connect with other business professionals using social networking sites such as LinkedIn, GroupMe, and Shapr.

●      Listen to leadership podcasts. Some of the best podcasts for leaders include “Recode Decode” with Kara Swisher, “HBR IdeaCast”, and “No Ego”.

Once you’ve dedicated some time to boosting your career skills and learning how to become a better leader, you’ll be ready to take advantage of emerging business opportunities in industries such as eCommerce and telemedicine. And if you need some guidance or training along the way, don’t hesitate to enlist the help of the professionals at Hervé.

3 key characteristics of resilient people

In my book What Color Is Your Sky?, I introduce the concept of living on the green curve, a resilient, focused, proactive way of living daily. Learning and perfecting specific life skills and attitudes can be a game-changer. In particular, I encourage you to read and practice the Deliberate Morning Program.

This implies that, over time, you learn from hardship and persist. How can you suffer real setbacks and not falter? During these times of anxiety and deep change, what helps people ultimately bounce back? Find out how resilience at work can literally save lives.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.” — Dean Becker, president, and CEO of Adaptive Learning Systems.

Resilience can be learned. I recently read an excellent article from Harvard Business Review: “How Resilience Works,” by Diane Coutu, director of client communications at Banyan Family Business Advisors, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which introduces 3 characteristics that may reinforce this:

• Face and accept reality:  Resilient people have down-to-earth views that matter for survival. Pushing for a sense of possibility is powerful, but for longer or bigger challenges, a grounded sense of reality is far more important. Ask yourself: “Do I truly understand—and accept—the reality of my situation? Does my organization?”

• Search for meaning:  Reframing your situation and seeking a deeper meaning to what is happening can mean the difference between giving up and hanging in there, believing in a better-constructed future. The reference book on this matter is Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. I encourage you to spend time clarifying your personal purpose and that of your company’s.

• Become a bricoleur: Keep bouncing back by doing the most with what you have. You may need to improvise solutions from thin air. This calls for agility, positivity, and enthusiasm.

Are you facing serious transformational challenges in your company? If you are, simply drop me a line at sky@herve.com.