By Muhammad Muzzammil Bashir
While mastering essential skills and knowledge is crucial, true success today often hinges on going beyond the baseline and actively cultivating personal growth. It’s about unlocking your full potential and becoming the best version of yourself.
It’s common that in order to do your job effectively, you need to have the technical know-how, or more so, you need to earn a certificate and license in order to practice for professional careers. These are the essentials. The prerequisite for skill practice. They provided the foundation – the sturdy scaffolding upon which we built our lives. They equipped us with the knowledge and skills to navigate the complexities of the world and secure a foothold in the ever-churning tide of life.
In this constantly ever-changing world, with different definitions of success always emerging, from being prowess with hard work to earning academic accolades, or both, now to low-profile, nuanced skills that are embedded in our personal character, termed soft skills, personal growth skills, or more so abilities beyond the technical, that propel us toward success. The skills, degrees, and certificates we earn alone may not, by themselves, help us build the career path we aim to reach. We found ourselves in an era where the application of artificial intelligence is rampantly proliferating, where distance and space are no longer barriers, and where employers are looking for employees that have skills that show the warmth of empathy, active listening, imagination, time management, efficiency, and the spark of passion to ignite
self-discovery.
In his famous book, Skills Rather Than Just Degrees, Professor Isa Ali Pantami cited that the major unemployment challenges Nigeria faces are not, in part, the unavailability of jobs but rather, unemployability, where “positions cannot be filled because there are graduates and candidates without the requisite skills to take up such positions.” This is where personal growth steps in: having the dexterity to handle complex projects under pressure, to think critically outside the box, to prioritize tasks at hand, and to problem-solve effectively and efficiently. It’s about communication skills—the ability to organize your thoughts and communicate them in a clear, precise, and simple way without ambiguity while putting empathy and compassion into consideration. It’s about your interpersonal skills, how you relate to your peers, and your emotional intelligence—how you react to things that happen around you. Personal growth isn’t a linear path; it’s a winding journey punctuated by triumphs and stumbles, laughter and tears. It’s about embracing the detours—the unexpected turns that lead us to hidden treasures within ourselves. It’s about learning from our mistakes, not as failures but as stepping stones to a higher vantage point. Personal growth is about recognizing that the pursuit of knowledge is not confined to textbooks but blooms in the fertile ground of lived experiences. It’s the volunteer project that pulls us outside our comfort zones, revealing hidden depths of empathy and strength. It’s the heartbreak that cracks open our hearts, teaching us the profound dance of vulnerability and resilience.
In this era, what employers look for in candidates now is, mostly in part, what benefit you can bring to the table, how critical and quick you are in thinking and spotting opportunities, how open-minded you are in adapting to new ideas and environments, how broad-minded you are in project management, and how good you are in thinking about how those projects can be executed in a cheap and better way. So also, how analytical are you at predicting the future? Personal growth is about cultivating the habit of lifelong learning. A lifelong learning habit will give you an edge among your peers, make you important and relevant in your workplace, or give you a competitive edge in your business domain.
Great leaders, either in business or public organizations, tend to excel in their respective domains because they read books, update themselves regularly with the current trends in their domain, and choose to go out of their comfort zone to seek new knowledge and experience. You are better off succeeding at your job or business if you use your time to read books for personal and career growth that will change your thinking and broaden your imagination. You are better off succeeding if you use your time to learn soft skills from online learning platforms like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, and LinkedIn online courses, among many others, to leverage the gap for the skills you lack that will give you a competitive advantage in your
domain or help you land a job in top-notch corporations. You are better off succeeding if you use your data subscription to watch Youtube videos, TedTalks, documentaries, and listen to postcards that will hone your skills, broaden your knowledge, and open your eyes to global trends in your career. You are better off succeeding if you can give yourself to volunteering and/or internships, especially at the beginning of your career, where you will have ample opportunity to gain lots of experience and mentorship and, at the same time, clinch a job whenever there is a vacancy in the organization or from a different organization through a referral from someone in the organization you are volunteering for.
You are better off succeeding if you seek out mentors that can offer valuable insights, shortcuts, and advice on navigating challenges you might face and share their expertise in your field, helping you develop new skills or refine existing ones and provide unbiased feedback on your work, performance and ideas. This can help you identify areas for improvement and make more informed decisions. Personal growth is a lifelong journey, not a destination. Embrace the process, enjoy the learning and witness how it transforms you into a more successful and fulfilled individual.
Muhammad Muzzammil Bashir can be reached via; mbashir199@yahoo.com