Personal Development Plan For Future Growth

Question

Task: Prepare a detailed reflective report presenting a strategic personal development plan for future growth and development.

Answer

Background
The purpose of this report is to develop a strategic personal development plan for my future growth and development. In this regard, I have portrayed my personal core values, mission and vision. I have used the strategic framework of SWOT analysis for identifying my own strengths and weaknesses. Based on this analysis, I have formulated suitable strategies for working on my areas of improvement and development. Furthermore, this SWOT analysis has helped me to determine my critical success factors and other distinctive competencies that would contribute towards my personal and professional growth and development. Eventually, I have aligned my goals with the core values, mission and vision. Based on these goals, I have developed a suitable action plan by using the SMART framework. In addition, the evaluation and review of progress towards the action plan have also been provided.

I am currently pursuing my MBA course from the University of Leicester, UK that is scheduled to be completed by December 2021. I completed by BBA degree from Helwan University, Egypt in May, 2003. I have worked in various job profiles of sales and accounting areas such as, senior sales executive, sales supervisor and account manager, area sales manager, senior key account manager, head of sales and marketing and head of channel sales. While working at these various roles, I realized the need of pursuing higher studies for my professional development and thus, I joined the course of MBA. In this report below, I have analysed my strengths and weaknesses and accordingly developed the action plan.

Personal Core Values
I have realized that there are various core values present in my character that enable me to work as a successful and professional sales professional. These include curiosity, emotional intelligence, accountability, independence, courage, creativity, honesty and confidence. Curiosity enables me to seek new ways and emotional intelligence for recognizing my own emotions along with others. Furthermore, independence, courage and accountability help me to take responsibility of my own work and tasks without depending on others. Lastly, creativity, confidence and honesty are also beneficial for my professional career. These values enable me to become a better professional alongside focusing on personal growth.

Mission and Vision
My mission is to successfully carry out my professional responsibilities alongside focusing on my career goals, growth and development. In this regard, I constantly focus on improving my personal and professional development. Furthermore, my vision is to work as the head of the sales and marketing department of an MNC in the next two years. For this purpose, I am working towards both my short-term and long-term goals so that this vision can be fulfilled in the next two years. In addition, I have also been focusing on improving various personal and professional skills in this regard.

SWOT Analysis

Strategies for Improvement
It is essential for me to focus on my key areas of improvement for developing suitable strategies. These strategies would further enable me to overcome by current weaknesses and use them to my opportunity for developing both personal and professional lives. I need to focus on remaining calm and composed by reducing my stress levels when deadlines remain unmet. Instead, I should handle the situation calmly and identify ways of reducing any delay. In this regard, I can practice meditation for being in a calm state of mind. I should take up various professional courses for improving my knowledge on marketing areas. I should also take up certain marketing tasks and engage in discussion with professionals for gaining detailed insight. Furthermore, I should also try to undertake a conscious attempt of being more patient in any situation. This would enable me to gradually increase my patience and use it in critical situations. Besides, I should introspect about the reasons for not liking criticisms from seniors as constructive criticisms are useful for improvement. In this regard, I can try to communicate clearly with the seniors and understand how those criticisms can help me to become better.

Critical Success Factors
I have analysed my critical success factors as well from the SWOT analysis. These include my more than 19 years of professional experience in the sales and marketing field. Economic stability that would enable me to start something new of my own in the next five to six years. I have also developed strong communication and interpersonal skills over the years while working in sales and networking with various people. My persistence, honesty, integrity, determination and commitment have helped me to carry out my professional duties at various critical aspects. In addition, my enthusiasm is another success factor that enables me to learn new things and pursue professional goals in an effective manner.

Distinctive Competencies
From the SWOT analysis, I have also identified my distinctive competencies that would help me to achieve success in the future and accomplish great things in my professional career. These include my long working experience in the sales field along with an MBA degree that I will acquire within few months, knowledge in different areas of business planning, commercial operations, forecasting, accounting and operations alongside marketing and sales and other soft skills like leadership qualities, conflict resolution, negotiation and others essential in today’s business environment. Besides, I also possess various professional development achievements and experiences at different locations that have enabled me to work effectively in teams of people from various backgrounds.

Goals
The strategic goals I would like to mention in this personal development plan for the next five years will be:
• Exploring and gaining knowledge about key areas of marketing both online and offline,
• Working on improving key areas of lack of patience, being criticized and becoming stressed in critical situations,
• Focusing more on both personal and professional development through enhancing soft skills and acquiring different technical skills prevalent in the current business environment,
• Aiming towards developing more leadership and people management skills for handling workforce, operations, issues and situations

Action Plan
An action plan has been developed based on the key areas of improvement, goals and vision that I have for the future. This plan will be beneficial in not only achieving both short-term and long-term goals but also contribute positively towards career growth and development. These above goals and actions are based on the SMART framework as they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and with a given timeframe.

Evaluation and Review
The goals and actions mentioned in the above plan will be evaluated and reviewed for measuring my progress over time. In this regard, I will follow a tracking method every week against some set targets or goals specifically for achieving at the end of the week. In this regard, I will use both performance and success indicators for evaluating the progress against the weekly objectives. While performance indicators would help to assess my technical skills, leadership abilities and others, the success indicators would be useful in evaluating the progress from the success completion of each task undertaken in the whole week. At the end of the week, the outcomes will be tallied with the weekly objectives and necessary measures will be undertaken for improvement.