I love continuous professional development (CPD for short). Big time. My favourite types of CPD are interactive and on either my specialist areas or translation. As I say in the introduction to my CPD Record, there are three key reasons I put such a strong emphasis on CPD:
1) Understanding my subject areas and constantly improving my translation and writing skills means I can do justice to the words I translate and the people who wrote them.
2) It makes my job easier. When I understand the subject matter I’m translating, I know I’m using the right terms in the right way, and I can ask my clients relevant questions to ensure they get the best end result possible.
3) I love it. I’m passionate about my specialist areas and the links between them, so CPD is always a joy.
But how do I decide what I want to do? What will help me make the most progress in my business?
Every year I take myself on a solo business retreat to review what I’ve been doing over the past year and decide how I want to move forward in the coming year. This involves a lot of deep thinking, a lot of brainstorming and a lot of analysis. I tend to focus on a few key areas and a big one is always CPD.
During my last business retreat, back in September last year, I split my skills/knowledge into three categories – translation/language, specialisms and business – and wrote down the key skills and knowledge I need in each area for my business to succeed. I then used a traffic light system to indicate how strong I felt my skills were in each area. This was based on a gut feeling of confidence in that area, probably influenced by an awareness of how much training I had already done and how recently (i.e. not very scientific).
Here is the result of my translation/language skills analysis:*
At the top you can see my strongest skills, my native language skills followed by my passive second language skills and translation. This basic exercise clearly shows that I need to work on my second language speaking and listening skills. So I made a plan to do just that.
I now regularly listen to French and Spanish language podcasts and news bulletins in my source languages while getting ready in the morning or exercising. I particularly like El Hilo for Spanish and Sur le grill d’Ecotable for French. Listening to conversations and reports relevant to my work also helps me to stay up to date with current affairs and news in my specialist areas. More recently I set up conversation exchanges with some old friends to practice speaking French and Spanish in an informal setting.
I still struggle to understand everything in very colloquial French and still often need the subtitles when I watch Dix pour cent [Call My Agent!].
Over the last year I have also taken part in various translation and writing workshops and attended a number of events on topics from revision to copy writing. Just because I feel those are my strengths, certainly doesn’t mean I’ll neglect them; they are after all critical skills for my business. Every quarter I refer back to my plan and check I’m on track and whether there’s anything else I need to incorporate. Given the work I’ve put in I would say the chart below more accurately reflects how I feel about my skills now. It’s motivating to see that I’m moving in the right direction.
Apart from translation and language skills, I reviewed my specialist area knowledge and business skills and created a CPD plan for each of those too. It sounds like a lot of work but by maintaining and improving my skills I can deliver quality to my clients, taking pride in my work and having the confidence to work with clients I like on projects I enjoy.
During my next business retreat this autumn, I’m going to trial different ways to assess my skills, so watch this space!
How do you review your skills? What have you been working on over the last year?
* You might have noticed that I split out general and specialist and colloquial and formal language and that my levels are quite different for French and Spanish. This is because I started learning Spanish in Year 7, spent my year abroad in Spain and have visited Barcelona for at least two weeks for the last 7 years (bar last year of course). French on the other hand, I started learning aged 21 and my only truly immersive experience of French was in Senegal when I frequently had to act as an informal interpreter between a mixed language group. Back then I would have said my French speaking and listening skills were definitely in the green. In short, for French I have let things slide far too far. (Let me be clear, even though I put conversational French speaking firmly in the red, I could (and can) speak and understand French, but not as well as I would like. I was rusty and lacked confidence because I didn’t practice as much as I should have.)
