Keeping in touch with industry developments is crucial

In a world that is continuously changing, staying up to date in any industry is particularly challenging for companies.
Having an established brand, a good product or a degree in the case of young professionals is not necessarily enough today.
To stay competitive and in demand, companies and graduates will undoubtedly need to look into additional activity, learning and certifications to stay relevant.

To help stay on the ball with industry challenges and ahead of the learning curve, focused and consistent effort is critical, especially on how to think strategically.
There are the obvious motivations for keeping abreast with what is happening in your career field or business like preserving a competitive edge in the marketplace or positioning yourself strategically for a promotion.

But there are also some not so obvious reasons that might even be more essential for your long-term professional success.
Staying well-informed and routing your career to be anchored on the boundaries of knowledge can considerably increase your credibility, acceptability, relevance, and value among colleagues and influential leaders in your industry.
In whatever industry, your business or job will involve having to react to news and current developments, or understanding their implications on your operations. In many cases, you will find that your operations or career are more professionally tied to events, let alone you just having a passing interest.

Though keeping up with vast amounts of developments in any field is a challenge for companies, teams and businesses, the only way to ensure their employees are fully productive and able to achieve company goals is to make sure there is continuous learning.
So the question we should be asking is, how do we not only embrace this need for learning but provide venues for employees to take advantage of learning opportunities?

An inexpensive and practical way to start is to encourage teams to attend specific meetings, maintain an active network of contacts within a profession, draw suggestions from industry expert evaluations, assessing the need to respond to new innovative practices in a particular field and keeping updated on new government or industry regulations among others.
In a technologically disruptive work environment, only organisations and individuals keen on persistently following and analysing existing trends will survive.

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The writer is a post graduate student at the University of Dar es Salaam