Advancing in your chosen career path and staying relevant as an executive can depend on your ability to keep building both hard and soft skills. Rather than letting your knowledge stagnate, you can seek out new opportunities to add to your personal toolkit and grow as a professional.

Pursuing executive education is a way to acquire new hard skills—including familiarity with new technologies and concepts, such as generative AI. It also provides an opportunity to build your soft skills, focusing on interpersonal communication with colleagues and customers, everyday leadership, and other collaborative abilities.

It's easy to see how a continued focus on building a well-rounded skill set can increase your value as you seek out lasting success and advancement. The question then becomes which particular aspects of your professional persona to focus on.

Read more: See the value of flexible learning opportunities.

Why improving your professional skills matters

Committing time and effort to continuous professional development is a good idea for a few separate but related reasons. By building new skills, you can:

• Remain optimally effective in your current role. All industries are changing at all times, and being intentional about your skill development is the best way to keep up with the evolution of the technologies and strategies you use every day.
• Seek a promotion to a new level of responsibility: Entering into the executive ranks or moving up within your company's leadership structure requires you to prove that you're aligned with current best practices. Essential skill development through executive education can prove that you're putting in the effort to incorporate new ideas.
• Enter the job market for executive roles: Seeking out a high-level position with a new employer may be even more challenging than moving into such a role with a current organization. Engaging in targeted professional skill development is a strong resume-building move.

Read more: Discover the organizational value of leaders with advanced soft skills.

Whether you're eager to remain in a current role or cast a wider net for opportunities, it's wise to keep up with your skill-building, especially as you navigate shifts in the industry. GenAI use in the corporate space provides a great example of why this is so important.

Five years ago, GenAI was a novel and limited technology. In the time since, executives across industries, countries, and business sizes have executed massive strategic shifts to incorporate GenAI algorithms into their workflows. Managers whose skill sets haven't developed through this period of change may find themselves on the outside looking in.

Read more: Learn how digital transformation is affecting companies today.

Building hard skills and soft skills

When choosing how to build your executive abilities through specifically chosen courses, you can focus on a mix of hard, technical knowledge and soft, interpersonal aptitude. A great leader will stay up to date in both areas, as each contributes to ongoing success and development.

• Hard skills: These are important because they allow you to tap into the state of the art in your industry and lead with confidence and authority. Industry-specific knowledge and best practices fall into the hard skill category, along with specific techniques involving new technologies and methodologies.
• Soft skills: These matter because leaders without interpersonal and communication aptitude will struggle to successfully guide their teams, especially in an era when mentorship and guidance have taken the place of more top-down "command and control" methods. Collaboration ability, emotional awareness, and the ability to inspire others are all soft skills.

Read more: Find out all about new programs around GenAI use for executives.

It's tempting to assume executive education is mostly about hard skills and that soft skills are more innate to individuals. That dichotomy is false, however. Courses specifically designed to build managers' interpersonal abilities make up an important segment of executive education, one that can help you develop your ability to lead and your grasp of motivation, mentorship, and collaboration with colleagues.

By shaping your learning journey to match your intentions, you can build yourself into a more well-rounded executive in the eyes of employers and prepare to take the next steps in your career.

Read more: Learn how analytical thinking helps executives.

Impactful ways to improve your professional skills

There's more than one way to build professional skills. Executive education courses provide such a valuable setting for developing your abilities because they allow you to pursue multiple useful methods at once, taking in information through lectures and presentations, group work, independent study, and more.

Specific practices that help with professional growth include:

• Setting goals and objectives. If you're setting out to learn certain ideas and encourage improvement in targeted areas, you'll find it easier to stay focused and deepen your knowledge. Personal growth objectives and self-guided challenges help you retain new information and put it into action.
• Learning directly from experts: Finding the most knowledgeable thinkers in your chosen field is a strong professional development method. One of the advantages of executive education at prestigious institutions is the ability to gain insights from faculty members on the cutting edge of their respective areas of study.
• Performing collaborative group work: Exchanging ideas with your peers while working together on a project is a strong way to build your professional knowledge. These projects can simultaneously teach you about specific industry subject matter while also encouraging you to build collaborative soft skills through everyday usage.
• Completing assignments based on real-world scenarios: One way to instill your professional development work with both realism and relevance is to bring your actual business problems into the discussion. By reviewing specific case studies and addressing your company's real circumstances, you can immediately apply what you're learning.
• Networking with peers across industries: Interacting with fellow business leaders who are dealing with similar issues from different perspectives is an important part of professional development. As you take on challenges together and put theories into practice, these interactions deepen your engagement with new information.

Executive education can take a few forms, such as individual courses, non-degree certificate programs, and online sprints. Any of these options can help you pursue professional skill development in multiple ways at once.

Read more: Find out the value of strategic innovation and change management.

How MIT Sloan Executive Education courses help with essential skill development

MIT Sloan Executive Education provides an environment where participants learn from top thinkers in their respective industries and disciplines. Whether in-person or online, the courses contain a strong collaborative component, giving you the ability to network with your instructors and fellow participants and engage in group work.

The constantly refreshed course list includes high-demand hard skills, now including a wide variety of practical applications for GenAI specialities. Other courses target the interpersonal soft skills that matter for leaders at all levels, from team leads to C-suite decision-makers.

By working with a prestigious institution, you gain access to innovative faculty within a sophisticated learning environment. The theories that are animating modern business often come from MIT, and participants in these executive education courses gain an early window into the latest practices.

Read more: Learn how MIT Sloan Executive Education participants evolved within their career paths.

Get started building professional skills

Enrolling in an MIT Sloan Executive Education program that ties into your industry or personal interests is a way to keep your professional skills fresh and build a resume that can impress potential employers. Whether you're aiming for advancement, a change of career, or just a more effective way to take on your current responsibilities, an infusion of knowledge from these courses can give you the professional growth you need.

Find a course that's right for you and add new skills to your resume.