How can personal development, training courses, etc improve your career?
In my experience, very rarely will a hiring manager hire someone just because they have trained on a certain technology or because they hold a certain certification. Certainly if the course or certification is a rare one, that might help your chances but typically hiring managers want people with hands on experience.
One of the things people often neglect to do is ensure that they properly describe their personal development and training endeavors in their resume using full words and also acronyms if they’re commonly used. If I held a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer designation, I’ll spell it out just like I did but also use it’s acronym MCSE in case someone does a search for “MCSE” only without spelling the certification out in full just so my resume would be picked up both ways.
Same goes with a degree like the MBA for example. Some people might think it’s pedantic but the truth is that people search databases differently and use different keyword searches to find job candidates so it’s best to cover your bases.
If you’ve recently starting using a certain technology or platform, have experience with a piece of software, have knowledge of certain protocols or have anything else that you’re working with in a hands-on way, you never know when it can come in handy and when someone might be searching resumes for people who have that skill. If you don’t have it listed properly in your resume, you may not be found but the person looking for someone just like you.
