If you're looking for the best free professional development courses available, try auditing this course Professional Development: Improve Yourself. In the audit version, you can assess most of the material but will not be able to submit assignments or receive grades or a certificate for your work unless you upgrade.
If you're looking for professional development courses to get your career off to a great start, then look no further than the Career Success Specialization, Wharton Achieving Personal and Professional Success Specialization, People and Soft Skills for Professional Success, and Professional Skills for the Workplace for the perfect introductory courses. Each of these courses offer valuable insight into the skills and knowledge needed for success in the professional world.
The Professional Development: Improve Yourself course on Coursera is an excellent way to get started on professional development. You'll learn about personal and professional qualities, develop critical skills and acquire the knowledge you need to excel in the workplace. Additionally, the Inspired Leadership Specialization is designed to help you become an inspired leader who can motivate and inspire others. The series of courses will help you build leadership skills like teamwork, decision making, communication, and problem solving.
Professional development is the accumulation of knowledge gained in conferences, classes, seminars, workshops, and continuing education programs that a professional person pursues to advance their career. When career-minded workers seek professional development, it is often in certified learning situations to help them achieve a higher level of personal effectiveness. Professional development programs give users an opportunity to grow new skills from innovations in their chosen industry. The general idea of most professional development programs is to increase your professional effectiveness through learning new ideas, concepts, and methods.
Learning professional development can help you gain new knowledge, ideas, and concepts in your work field to help you advance in your chosen career. For example, you may be a software engineer and learn that your company has plans to move to a new database system in a year’s time. You would then seek out courses on the topic to prepare yourself for the change. Professional development courses are important to learn as they can help you to become certified in a certain sector of your work. This might lead to increased pay or a position that is more rewarding to you.
You may find career opportunities in learning how to teach professional development in professional learning operations, leadership development companies, training and development agencies, career advisory services, instructional coaching mentorships, and other similar development and teaching fields. If you are more interested in learning the principles of professional development to help you in your career, these principles can be valuable in corporate jobs in sales and marketing, human resources, and operations management. Professional development that is specific to your career field can help you advance within your field.
Taking online courses in professional development can give you insights into self-change, self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-directed learning. Learning about professional development can also help you to listen better and understand the professional needs of others more succinctly in your work. When you learn professional development skills, you can become better equipped also to navigate your career into higher levels of responsibility.