More time

This week I have gone part time. Instead of a nine to five, five day work week, I’m now working four days a week at reduced hours. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I think the time is right. This is also giving me the opportunity to develop new skills. So, what will I do?

The three areas in which I think I should develop my skills are: I would like to improve my French language knowledge because I think I should work on my language skills at this specific point of British history. The only positive effect of the Brexit referendum result has been for me that I’m an even more staunch European than before.

Secondly, I want to learn more about technology. I think that technology is becoming ever more important in the workplace and that does not exempt universities. So, I want to learn more about coding, programming, web development, and data analytics. The workplace is depending increasingly on these skills and people in universities need to adapt to that just as much because these are the skills that we will have to imbue in our students – what better time than to learn them now? Also, my service is ever more focusing on analysing our student data to improve the student experience, and I think evidence and data-driven employability services are the future.

And thirdly, I want to develop my professional networks further. I am keen to find out how  my contacts are working so I will spend some time meeting people and learning a little bit about how they do their work in the field of employability and beyond. I’ve always done this when travelling to a new place, meeting up with people I only knew online – now I’d like to intensify this approach.

So, that’s my plan. Is there anything else you think I should learn? Send me a comment on Twitter, give me ideas on LinkedIn, let’s meet and talk – let’s see what happens. I will be happy to hear from you.

October 6th, 2016 by