I was reading through the August 2009 edition of Management Today the other day and saw a quote that was attributed to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (Management Today, August 2009, p 19)

“What’s dangerous is not to evolve.”

This set of a chain of thoughts that led me back to a quote that I had heard in an audio by Brad Sugars, founder & CEO of ActionCoach about businesses

“… a business is like a tree, its either growing or dying… it cannot stand still…”

Now, I bet you’re thinking what has that got to do with personal growth and development. Well, either as business owners or employees we need to be part of a growing organisation to protect and grow our incomes & wealth. With the rate of change of technologies, innovations, the speed of business today and ever increasing competition, if we are not evolving, growing and developing we are going to be left behind.

So how do you go about doing that? I set myself the challenge of generating a list of 20 resources that could be used to research, learn or develop new skills and knowledge and ended up with the list below. I bet there are more, if you can think of any then why not add them as a comment. Here goes

1. Hard print books
2. e-books
3. e-courses
4. short courses
5. Formal qualification courses (degrees/diplomas)
6. DVD delivered courses
7. CD delivered courses
8. Websites
9. Blogs
10. Audio files
11. E-mail delivered courses
12. Webinars
13. Teleseminars
14. Seminars
15. Conferences
16. Mentor
17. Coach
18. Placements
19. Secondments
20. Volunteering
21. Part-time employment
22. Specialist Magazines
23. Periodicals
24. Journals
25. Article archives/databases such as Emerald
26. One-to-one/Peer-to-peer training
27. Web delivered courses
28. Television programmes (e.g. Open University)
29. Professional Institutions
30. Special interest societies/groups
31. Private tuition

And another one I have just thought of
Online videos