Personal Development Plan

1. Introduction

This paper seeks to prepare a personal development plan in my objective to become a leader in an organization. I will analyze the requirements of the targeted job in relation to my inventory of skills including my strengths and weaknesses in relation to the requirement of a goal in mind for which I am willing to know my deficiencies in terms of skills. I will therefore have to make an action plan on how to correct my deficiencies and to improve on my weaknesses to take advantage of my strengths in attaining a target job that I want to have and quality of a person that I want to happen as a result.

2. The Goal, Requirements, Deficiencies and the Strategies

2.1 My goal and its requirements

The goal of this plan is to be able to attain the position of Pricing analyst which requires the following: having strong analytical skills and ingenuity to provide logical solutions to nonstandard issues, having a strong mathematical aptitude as well as well developed communication skills (written and verbal), being computer literate (including working knowledge of Excel and Word) and possessing the values of resourcefulness, organizational skills and ability to coordinate activities across company function. It further requires having demonstrated ability to work well under pressure to meet critical deadlines, having the ability to adapt to changing priorities and handle multiple tasks and having an exceptional attention to detail and problem solving skills.

2.2 Determined deficiencies and the causes of their perceived causes of having them

Using as basis the job requirements and compare the same with my present inventory of skills, I found out that the targeted job requires the need for demonstrated ability to work well under pressure to meet critical deadlines as well as at the ability to adapt to changing priorities and handle multiple tasks. I believe this requires utmost patience on the part of person to be hired for the job. A patient person will not be easily being cowed into giving up for pressure as the person would normally consider pressure as part of the job. A patient person will also find the need to adapt to changing priorities and handling multiple tasks to be part of the challenge. I definitely need to be more patient partly because of my attitude of perfectionism which is rather out of proportions sometimes.

Further comparison of my inventory of skills with the requirement of the job revealed that my verbal communication skills are weak as may be proved from past experiences when I have delegated tasks to people that resulted to some misunderstandings. I have diagnosed the in many instances times about the reasons for these misunderstandings and I found them in failure to make my instructions in a way that may be fully and intelligently understood. In wrongly believing that my own understanding results to my teammates understanding, I really have made a short cut of effective communication which is creating inefficiency to my job.

I find deficiency also in my organizational skills as evidenced by my having overlooked a lot of times important details in my job because of deficient communication skills, failure to delegate and ineffectiveness if making motivations to my people.

2.3 Strategies to address deficiencies with corresponding time table

The way I am going to tackle these leadership deficiencies is to set up a plan where I can draw on personal and others feedback. I have talked to my manager, supervisor, and other coworkers and they have agreed to provide feedback to me on these three subjects. I am going to keep a journal, as well, so that I can track my own thoughts and feelings about how I am handling and improving in these tasks. Also, I plan to do some research on all there subjects so that I may obtain further information on these subjects. The following are the things that I plan to do within my time table.

Improving Patience

On the basis of the above, I found out that I really lacked patience; I have decided to increase my patience in more systematic manner. My high anxiety level, which causes me to get short with people, could really be bad if I will not improve my patience. I am planning to monitor my progress and evaluate myself weekly on my patience levels. In a year I want to get to a point where I can handle any situation, no matter what that entails. I want to get to the point where I don't let my anxiety interfere with my job duties and interactions with other.

Having stated earlier that lack of patience may be caused by my attitude of perfectionism, I feel addressing the latter is crucial to my development as a person for the desired job. Perfectionism makes me feel that I should always be imposing to people the highest requirement for many work activities without may be considering their capacities. My strategies for improvement of correction of said perceived caused of lack of patience are to analyze the importance of having something perfect in relation to realistic goals of every activity. Since every activity may have its deadline, I would devised an improve schedule so that I will not push myself unnecessarily on things.

But since I may never know if I am progressing on this activity, I would measure my progress and my criteria for measuring the same would be to have less frustration with progress while ensuring that work is still successfully accomplish. The time table for this is one month intervals

Improving communication

One of the requirements of the targeted job is having a strong mathematical aptitude as well as well developed communication skills (written and verbal). Finding my skills to be lacking in this respect, I have decided to effectively improve my verbal communications skills continually by relying on feedback from manager and supervisors in my present job as well as peers and family and friends.

In my own analysis what is causing my poor communication is the spontaneous and impulsive comments to teammates as I perceived bad comments in return making such irresponsive comments which offend their feelings, hence I would really need to reflect on how my comments would affect others. This is in addition to developing of course and an effective communication plan verbally and in writing.

To know whether I would be progressing I would be recording my observance of the absence of