For many licensed professionals, continuing education is a required part of work. Champions among these professionals have a deep understanding of their personal strengths and in-demand skills. With this understanding, they are able to leverage their continuing education and ultimately accelerate their careers.

Start by Understanding your Areas of Strength

While there is tremendous value in improving upon your weaknesses, it is, in fact, more beneficial to find and focus on your areas of strength. Research has shown that individuals gain more when they build on their talents than when they make comparable efforts to improve their areas of weakness. Given this, doesn’t it make sense to hone in on your strengths and become amazing at those select skills? Then focus on performing those skills with your time at work?

Generalists are often handy in certain situations, but becoming the best in one or two areas makes you the go-to person in your workplace for those needs. Not only does this get you more noticed by management and colleagues, but it strengthens a positive feedback loop.

There is an excellent book about identifying your strengths by Marcus Buckingham called Now, Discover Your Strengths. Without the book, you can use this “Better way to Discover Your Strengths” from award-winning author and professor Adam Grant for another source of guidance.

Know the In-Demand Skills of Your Field

Understanding the most desirable skills in your field is a difficult and continuous process. Think about the buzzwords that are floating around management, C-level executives, training sessions, key opinion leaders, and colleagues you respect. Additionally, exercise a higher level of conscious observation within your workplace to see where people get frustrated, need help, and require aid from management. By filling in these gaps in others’ performance, you start to get noticed and become the one person people go to.

Online continuing education is highly accessible for healthcare professionals. Many educators offer free continuing education courses for nurses, dental professionals, and numerous other fields.

By keeping track of your continuing education (CE) and fulfillment of license requirements with CE App, the process of finding the most relevant continuing education is easy and free. The app automatically serves you a list of educational options that are a best-match based on your profession and preferences. Preferences centered on the strengths you wish to improve on and the skills in demand at your workplace will undoubtedly allow you to learn efficiently and excel exponentially within your career.

Kyle Kahveci