Developing Your Personal and Employee Persona
Developing Your Personal and Employee Persona
Guest writer Ron Wilson explores the skills that we use in developing our personal and employee persona.
Over our work life a great deal of effort, education, time, and energy is spent on developing the “technical skills” relating to our careers. Technical skills relate to the technical part of any career. An accountant has technical skills relating to the specific role, just as an equipment technician has technical skills to perform repairs/rebuilds, troubleshooting and diagnostics of their career.
During our careers we develop a personal persona that is applied in our actions, roles, and responsibilities. As we progress through our career the types of information, skills, action needed changes and requires an ongoing balance of various skills development.
The skills needing to be developed can be placed into four areas:
- Technical Skills
- Personal Skills
- People Skills
- Operational Skills
Below is a diagram that shows an example of an employee’s personal and career persona. It is important to balance the skills developed in each of the areas. During a visiting with a Human Resource team, we discussed the most common reasons employees are terminated, or resign, and in most cases, it is not due to a lack of technical skills. The cause is usually related to one of the other three categories.
The diagram above really shows the importance of balancing the skills development of our teams. Making sure training and development opportunities are provided in each of the areas, and time is spent with the employee discussing the strengths and opportunities that will provide continued growth relating to the overall personal development.
The diagram below shows that our “Personal Persona” is identified in what we “say and think.” The “Employee Persona” is often seen in what do (our performance) and our relationships with others. In our everyday work we combine and exhibit all four areas.
While serving on the board of directors at SkillsUSA Arizona I was introduced to the following diagram. I took this diagram and applied it to the equipment dealer work environment. SkillsUSA does an excellent job of developing the students’ work and persona to prepare them for future employment.
