ontinuous learning
is key to maintaining your professional skills, and as with pursuing any goal it helps to have a plan.
In this case a professional development plan. When creating your development plan it is important to select the right skills to focus on.
How to Choose the Right Skills for Your Development Plan
When selecting skills to train ask the following questions.
Strengths or Weaknesses?
Reasons to focus on strengths
- You can gain energy from building strengths while fixing weaknesses can drain energy and enthusiasm.
- Groups naturally divide tasks and the team can gain efficiency if each member specializes on their strengths.
Reasons to focus on weaknesses
- gives you a more flexible toolkit
- over-specialization can make you a bottleneck within the team
Reasons to Balance Both
- combining a broad base of skills with a few specialisations is called T-shaped (one specialisation+broad-base) or π-shaped (two specialisations+broad-base) skillsets and is advocated by many thought leaders and recruiters.
Creative Approaches to Weaknesses
- Dr. Martin Seligman the positive psychology guru gives an example of a student who dreaded the long walk home every night from the library. He used his humor and playfulness to overcome his fear and turn the walk into a source of joy.
Find Out What Your Strengths Are
- Try a strengths assessment survey such as Via
Task or People Skills?
Hard skills (task-based) and soft skills (people-based) are both critical. Almost every job requires you to both:
Complete tasks independently, and
Collaborate effectively with others.
The best development plans include a mix of both.
Skills for Your Current Role, or Next Role?
Early in your career, focus on mastering the skills required for your current role. But once you reach a comfortable level of competence, shift your attention toward the skills you’ll need to grow into your next opportunity —or to create new ones.
Specific vs General Skills, Concrete vs Abstract?
I have already mentioned balancing specific skills and general skills with T-shaped or π-shaped skillsets. Specific skills tend to be more practical and concrete while general skills tend to be more theoretical and abstract. The theoretical and abstract ideas that you picked up while mastering concrete skills can be a springboard to launch yourself sideways into related technologies or a related field.
| Skills Type |
Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Concrete | Practical, task-specific, and easy to test | A programming language, a framework, using Excel formulas |
| Semi-abstract | Broader patterns or principles across contexts | Design Patterns, SOLID principles |
| Abstract | General problem-solving or conceptual tools | Divergent/convergent thinking, TRIZ, Systems Thinking |
Key Points:
- Concrete skills are often quicker to learn and easier to measure.
- Abstract skills are harder to master but can be applied widely across roles, technologies, and even disciplines.
- Combining both enables deeper learning and career agility.
Common Strategy ≠ Best Strategy
If you do what everyone else does, don't be surprise if you get the same results as everyone else.
From mentoring developers across various experience levels, I’ve noticed a common pattern:
Many professionals focus heavily on narrow technical skills and try to eliminate all weaknesses. This can be an effective approach early in a career—but it becomes limiting as your career progresses.
Many professionals focus heavily on narrow technical skills and try to eliminate all weaknesses. This can be an effective approach early in a career—but it becomes limiting as your career progresses.
I see many experience people not living up to their potential because they fail to widen and broaden the sources of their inspiration.
Final Thoughts
Your development plan should evolve with your career. Don’t just train for what you do today—train for what you want to become tomorrow. Balance is key: concrete and abstract, strengths and weaknesses, task and people skills. The most resilient professionals are those who invest in both depth and breadth—and who never stop learning.
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