Career and professional growth: is there a difference?

With the right approach professional growth is indeed accompanied by a career, and then all are satisfied: a specialist who received a deserved promotion, and an employer who received a valuable employee. However, in some cases professional and career growth does not go hand in hand, but separately. Why is this happening?

The fact is that professional growth and career growth are carried out, so to speak, in different planes. Professional growth is aimed at expanding the professional competence of the employee or to dive into one particular narrow area of ​​the profession. In turn, career growth is almost always directed upwards and implies employee mastering new skills, expansion of his powers.

Career growth, as a rule, is more noticeable thanprofessional. After all, professional growth is not accompanied by such significant changes: increasing wages, raising the social status, gaining some privileges. To notice the professional growth of a specialist it is possible by better or faster performance of assigned tasks, increasing the demand for this specialist among regular customers, and so on.

Many specialists complain that at the current place of work the opportunities for professional growth are inaccessible to them. However, if we look "deeper", it may turn out that this is far from being the case. After all, each specialist determines the criteria of his professional growth independently.

So, for some Professional growth is the achievement of goals with minimal resource costs, for others - recognition in professionalcircles, the third most important is the increase in wages. Therefore, it is important to establish certain criteria for professional growth for yourself, in order to understand how actively professional development is taking place and whether it is happening at all.

Where should professional growth begin? Ideally - with the right choice of profession. If a specialist has started his professional activity not by his own will, but because of some outside circumstances, then professional growth in this case will be greatly complicated. Only a great interest of a person in his profession can induce him to develop his professional skills and acquire new knowledge and experience.

In many companies, various seminars and trainings are held to improve the professional level of employees. If an expert strives professionallygrow, he should take part in similar events, and also independently develop his own professional knowledge base: study specialized literature, master new methods and consolidate them in practice.

For example, the master hairdresser can try himself in new complex hairstyles and hairdresses, the chef - in cooking foreign cuisine, the teacher can try innovative teaching methods. There are no boundaries for self-improvement and every specialist, whether he is a simple mechanic or a top manager of a large company, can begin his professional growth.