Where you are today is based on the education and skills that got you there. However if you aspire to career growth, you cannot afford to be complacent and wait for things to happen – you have to take ownership of your career.

REMEMBER the key to your future depends on your own commitment to learning and development of skills. By getting better at what you do and expanding the boundaries of your skills, you become more valuable to your team, customers, and company. This would lead to broadening your horizon and could also lead to new and better career opportunities within your current company or elsewhere.

So the importance of continual learning cannot be denied. The world is moving so fast that people who stand still will be passed by. Knowing more than the next person is a major competitive advantage and we cannot afford to remain stagnant in our knowledge.

Yet many people feel stuck when it comes to increasing their professional knowledge base. They work long hours, are overwhelmed with household responsibilities and unclear on how they can take out time for additional learning.

The secret lies in realizing two things. Use technology, it’s no longer necessary to learn in a classroom. Second, you can define your own time-frame. If you cannot spare an hour to devote to picking up new skills – how about 15 minutes? A couple of shorter stints composed of smaller time units can quickly add up–and mobile technology makes it easy to learn between other activities or during ones lunch break

Action step: Define your top three skills and choose one that you want to improve upon over the next months. Commit to spending 15 minutes every day, learning about it via books, magazines, podcasts, classes, etc. 