ACT Career Hub – a tool for professional development

Go back 08 May 2017 daniel_lemcke@hotmail.com

As a member of the Future Leaders working group I wanted to look at some of the member benefits offered and understand how relevant/ useful they were to me. I’ve written a diary of my month using the ACT Career Hub – I hope it inspires you to take a look at this member benefit.

As an AMCT who attends events and reads The Treasurer, I was keen to see what added value there was in accessing the career hub. I'm not looking for a new job, so I didn't want to use the CV aspects of the career hub, but as an ACT resource I wanted to see what other benefits I could get.

Week 1

I started off looking at the development sessions – these are broken down in to different sections: temperament, personality insights, motivation at work, personal resilience, emotional control, learning styles and strengthens to name but a few – the full list contains 14 assessments. After about 30 mins, I found myself immersed in my second mini development session.

I have to admit that I thought I would encounter a generic survey when I completed the assessment. But actually the results provided were insightful and helpful to understanding how I thought about concepts such as coping with change and support networks. It was interesting to see the consistency of results between the surveys, listing my underdeveloped and untapped skills against areas of confidence.


So what did I learn…

  1. Taking time out pays for itself – the simple task of focusing on yourself makes you reassess the priorities of the day and become more focused on what makes a difference.
  2. Making decisions clearer – by seeing your strengths and weaknesses played back to you, you now have a clearer picture on how you wanted to tackle each problem (e.g. continue to drive an area of strength, potentially delegate or take the time to develop an area of underdeveloped skills depending on the situation)
  3. You change – having completed similar surveys in the past, it was interesting to see how the results had changed. Personally, I found my previously strong quantitative skills being overtaken by my more creative and social side which was very interesting.
  4. Stale reflection – following on from the above, having a fresh perspective on your skills and development areas gives you a fresh approach to the tasks at work and study.
  5. Skills are not binary – the questions are designed to test and challenge you in a number of difference ways. Combining more than one test together gives you a more well rounded sense of how your skills flex and a more insight reflection on the areas of strength and weakness.

My take home from my first visit to the career hub was about the breadth of information available. The hub really is not just for enhancing you CV (although I believe it also assist there), but the value I had found was much more around understanding your own strengthens and weaknesses.

Week 2


Last week having focused on my own strengths and abilities I wanted to know how they applied to my career… This naturally led me onto a module titled Motivation at Work. I had completed a similar survey a few years earlier. For me, it was clear that the ‘pillars’ of my motivations had held constant, but following my change in role, there had been a shift in the emphasis of a number of categories.

So what where my take homes from week 2…

  1. Before and after – before completing the survey I would have said that my motivations and drivers at work were clear and known. But even before the results, the questions had made me ponder on a number of aspects.
  2. Real life examples – having completed similar surveys early in my career, coming back to this style of questioning now means that I can draw on a greater number of examples from real life. Thinking about the motivations and drivers of why I made those decisions and how I would make them again was a good catalyst from this survey.
  3. Not just work – your career is more than just a job and one of the aspects that this survey highlighted was that tasks outside work can supplement and enhance your overall career. Thinking about your charitable time, entrepreneurial activities, study and leadership roles outside of work can be equally as important.

As well as understanding your motivation at work and what drives you; Continual Professional Development is also an important and necessary aspect. Next week I will explore the tools available for tracking and undertaking your CPD points.

Week 3

Although the ACT’s CPD scheme does not count points, I wanted to see how I could record what I was doing on the career hub within my CPD record.

I had a quick refresher of “Interpreting financial accounts” and was prompted by my CPD record to review the technical aspects of The Treasurer. I used both of these to log information in my CPD record. I made sure that the information I looked at fitted the objectives I have set myself for this year. It was good to be able to use the information on the ACT Career Hub to show a tangible link to my professional development.

Week 4


Delving deeper into some of the practical skills was my focus this week. A skill that is critical to my role is facilitating meetings. In the spirit of continually developing and in my search for new tips and tricks, I read the information on good meeting discipline – although this was a bit basic it did provide some useful pointers. The other articles I read included:

  • Learning, doing and facilitating
  • Leading a successful meeting

These were actually more in-depth elearning courses, not articles, with content provided by Ashridge Business School. There were a few useful checks here and although we often think we know how to run a successful meeting it was good to have a formula for doing it.

My overall summary:

The ACT Career Hub is designed to be a tool/ platform from which you can manage your career. Keeping a record of your CV, learning and development and potential job applications can be a powerful resource but the career hub is much broader than that and contains some useful articles, elearning tools and insight. If you haven't been on the career hub yet do have a go - there are loads of resources on there, it's worth taking a look! And let the ACT know what you like and don't like at cpd@treasurers.org

Daniel Lemcke,

Principal at ELIXIRR

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