By ‘personal effectiveness’ we mean the skills and knowledge that are useful in a range of roles, such as how to make presentations, time management and so on. Not all of them may be of immediate use to you, and there may be a number of these areas that you are already skilled in. To help you decide what to focus on, we have created a short self-diagnosis tool which signposts self-help resources (coming soon) you can draw on to help you develop your skills in a specific area.
We have used the Association of University Administrators’ competence framework and the Researcher Development Framework in putting together this self-diagnostic tool. These frameworks, which list typical areas of skills and understanding needed by administrators and by researchers, provide an overview of areas that might be needed by most people in many jobs.
To identify areas you may need to develop in, simply evaluate your current skills level is for each topic by rating these High, Medium or Low. You then decide how great your need is to learn that topic using the same three ratings. You can then use your ratings to identify the topics that might be your priorities.
We know this is a somewhat rough and ready way of identifying what to focus on, and you may have good reasons for overriding the ratings (for example, your manager may want you to develop your knowledge of time management in order to brief everyone in the team on how to do this more effectively).
Once you have an idea of what your priorities are, you can look to see how best to meet your needs, taking account of the time you have available and your own preferences. You may find it helpful to look at POD courses and learning resources and Molly for learning solutions.
