The Personal Development Program
- Algė Masiulytė
Analytics
How important are soft skills?
As IT careers require a lot of technical knowledge, it is quite easy to start thinking that this is the only thing that matters when it comes to how attractive you are to potential employers. But when you start to actually talk to real HR specialists and dig a little into the research, you see that this is not the case at all. In a lot of situations the candidate’s non-technical skills (usually called soft skills) play an equally, if not an even more important role. Here are just some examples of abilities that a person with well-developed soft skills demonstrates:
Managing their time well
Getting along with and productively engaging with different types of people
Staying motivated throughout difficult challenges
Maintaining a high level of productivity
Knowing how and what to learn
Finding useful ways to utilise their personal strengths
Being able to share their knowledge with others effectively
Being able to look for and reach compromises that benefit the whole team
Inspiring their team to feel positive at work
If you were to imagine technical skills as the score that determines your value to a company, soft skills should be imagined as the multiplier to that number. So even if a person is extremely talented, if they are lacking in soft-skills, they can reduce their overall value to near-zero or in extreme cases, even become destructive. Similarly, someone who is just starting in a position can be of great value to the team if they know how to learn fast, if they help motivate others, and if they can find creative ways to be useful to the company.
The surprising thing is that a lot of other teaching institutions seem to place very little importance on soft skills in their curriculum. But we are different. As Turing College aims to give our graduates the best chance to secure amazing jobs, we see the development of soft skills as an essential part of our education process. That is why we have added the Personal Development Program to our curriculum.
What is the Personal Development Program
The Personal Development Program runs in parallel to the main technical-skills modules throughout your whole course and consists of the following:
Real-time events, such as workshops, with interesting people such as our career development coordinator and our HR consultant who has worked extensively in HR for IT companies
Getting-hired activities and practices in which our learners are meant to engage on their own in order to improve their soft skills, such as a personal presentation to reflect on their progress and a simulated job interview to get readier for landing a real job
1-1 meetings with the Turing College team in order to discuss the learner’s progress and direction in the Personal Development Program
Every topic in the Personal Development Program will have either three weeks dedicated to it. It will contain an online event (conducted either by us or by our partners) during which the topic will be introduced. In addition to this event, the topic will include guidelines for activities that will help learners to practice it day-to-day. This is another way in which Turing College differs from the traditional approaches taken by other institutions, where soft-skills development is quite often focused only on an event or a workshop, with little follow-up given afterwards. Our 1-1 meetings are meant to guide you through the process of identifying the exact ways and methods that best suit your individual situation. After all, everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, as well as different preferences on how to practice these skills.
The exact topics to be covered will be confirmed roughly a month in advance. Although Turing College has a default set of topics that we think are useful for all IT professionals to know and practice, we want to adapt the curriculum to our groups based on their needs and competences. Therefore, you will have opportunities to voice your opinion as a group on which topics you would prefer your group to see in the Personal Development Program.
The personal development program consists of three modules
How is the Personal Development Program going to be assessed?
Your 1-1 meetings with Turing College staff consist the primary way that your progress in the Personal Development Program is evaluated. Each person creates an individual plan that they then try to follow so that they can develop specific behaviors and habits of a soft skill. While developing competences in these skills will be important, the main thing that we want to teach our learners is to view soft skills as something that can be constantly improved, in other terms, there always is room for improvement. Showing evidence that you have learned to identify the relevant soft skills you need to develop, and that you have the ability to create reasonable, adaptive, long-term and effective strategies for developing them is going to be the main measure of your success in this program.
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Turing College