Enhancing personal skills is essential to your own individual development but it can also prove crucial to your professional growth, acceleration and recognition. Having the right exam results and qualifications on paper is of course both excellent and necessary for the legal sector, but to an employer, personal skills such as commercial awareness, time management and networking are important and extremely valued qualities which allow you to not only stand out, but help you to become a better rounded business person. That’s why, having these tangible skills can be career changing, which is why you should make a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course an essential part of your progression. So why should you enhance these skills and consider a skills-based course? Let us explain.
Let’s get personal
As a solicitor, you could be dealing with cases such as business fraud, personal injury or of course, serious offences including violent crimes. Alongside being a legal representative, this leaves you as a vital source of support for your client, especially if a particular crime or offence will have a lasting impact on their quality of life. Having an arsenal of strong personal skills such as listening and communication allows you to take a more human approach to each individual case which can help you to better understand, and therefore better serve, your client regardless of whether they’re the plaintiff or defendant.
Stand out to your employer
An individual with strong personal skills will be able to work effectively with colleagues, clients, employers and frankly, everyone around them, especially if they have an understanding of how to deal with difficult people and stressful situations or have enhanced negotiation skills. Building these quality relationships and a strong reputation can leave a positive impression with your employer and will allow you to nurture and project a team player persona, making you a more respected member of the team.
Streamline your skills
Employers will always opt for employees with exemplary personal skills such as problem solving, critical analysis and creative thinking, especially during times of promotion or team re-shuffling. If not fully utilised and nurtured on a daily basis, these traits can become stale and more difficult to summon when required. But through external training, they can be developed and can help you find new approaches and solutions to consistently assist with, and be a part of, your everyday processes for lasting success.
Showcase your commitment
There’s nothing more reassuring in business than a candidate who shows personal commitment to their own development further to the basic requirements and can clearly identify areas which need improvement. Undertaking a CPD course can display that you are a passionate individual, focused on taking the next step in your career as well as genuinely helping you to grow as a person and remain competent in your role.
Stay motivated
Whatever career path you choose in the legal sector, it can be all too easy to become bogged down with the everyday processes and you can easily lose sight of why you chose this career in the first place. However, undertaking external training such as our ‘Managing Yourself’ course can help to give you a much-needed boost to re-centre and focus on your role. Employers want members of the team to remain passionate and dedicated to what they do, so there’s no better way to start a new phase in your progression or to self-motivate yourself than through effective training.
Your personal skills can help you significantly with your overall progression and development in the legal sector. These skills are what allow you to become a more rounded individual and can help improve your approach to work and build valuable relationships with both clients and colleagues through a human-centric approach. Evidently, qualities such as personal awareness, negotiation and time management, among others, cannot be overlooked, which is why CPD courses prove invaluable, especially when looking to take the next step in your career. So what are you waiting for? Call us on 02920 451 000 or email us on: infoaltior@barbri.com