Continual Professional Development - proving new skills to non-technical employers

Posted by Tom on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Tom
Published on 2010-11-25T17:31:36Z Indexed on 2010/12/30 12:00 UTC
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training

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employment

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non-technical

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professional-development

Background

I work in a non-IT based company, as a professional software developer, building a large scale internal database system. I am fortunate to have a fairly senior position within the company, and have been working here for around 4 years.

Often I get asked by management "how do you learn new things?". To be honest, I don't know how to answer this. Over the last 6 months, I've really gotten my teeth into some new techniques and technologies to make my level of coding far better and hopefully improve the quality of the software.

Even if it's just refreshing my skills on things I've learnt already. Like last week I dived into some complex XLinq and TPL code (.net). Nothing revolutionary, but I feel like I am a bit better than before.

Question

The question is, how do I prove this to my employer? It'd be nice to be able to put this on paper.

Possibilities

I could:

Keep a journal of what I've learnt - keeping the technical bits in (nobody would understand or care, but it's better than them being omitted)
???? (I've run out of ideas already)

Any ideas? Thanks, Tom

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