Ask anyone what work they got done last week, and you will likely hear a list of deliverables. Client work, meetings (so many meetings), a deadline that moved… Almost nobody will mention time spent reading something that will change their approach on their next project, because in the mental accounting most of us keep, that time did not happen at work.
There are two types of activity that get treated this way with remarkable consistency. Learning and making your own work visible. They are also the two that decide whether anyone will hire you, brief you, or promote you in the next three years.
Personally, and with clients and students for a long time, I state that twenty to thirty per cent of the available time-resource of any professional activity should be allocated to learning and self-promotion. In an average work week, that is one full day. It sounds excessive right up to the moment you look at what happens to people who spend none.
Should professional development happen during working hours?
Yes, and so should the work of making your own competence visible. Both feed directly into what you or your employer can charge for, which makes them functions of the business rather than personal enrichment, and functions of the business get budgeted time.
I originally wrote this article in Italian in 2021, and both halves of the former sentence have gotten much heavier in 2026. Generative AI rearranged a large part of what several professions knew how to do in roughly eighteen months, which makes the shelf life of a skill set shorter than the average job tenure. And the decision to hire you, brief you, or put you on a shortlist increasingly happens before anyone speaks to you, on the strength of what is visible under your name. These are the next conditions to organize around.
The technician’s fallacy
Most people who go out on their own do so with what Michael Gerber, in The E-Myth Revisited, calls the technician’s mindset: they think of the work as the specialist’s content, and nothing else. A translator’s day goes to translating. A studio’s weeks are made of briefs, working sessions, and delivery.
If the business is going well, a small company will make sure someone is responsible for the books (usually a hired accountant) and devote a couple of weeks every year to marketing the company. When business is going well.
What almost never gets formalized is training. Time and how to use it are left to each person, with the not-always-subtle suggestion that they take care of it outside working hours. It is personal enrichment, after all.
It is not. Skills you acquire and sharpen feed directly into what a business can charge for, and there is no way to find work without deliberately looking after how that work is presented. No professional activity will survive without competence to do it and without people knowing it exists. These two are not a reward for the work; they are part of it.
Which is why any organization, of any size, should allocate its resources (time, money, and people) so that both training and promotion have real space. In a small company, that will mean an actual allowance of hours for learning, a budget for courses, books and events, and a shortlist of skills worth having and honing. It will also mean bringing everyone into the marketing effort within their reach: producing content for a website or newsletter, and attending industry events on the company’s time and at the company’s expense.
For a solo professional, it will mean something harder: making an effort to expand your definition of work.
The org chart for a company of one
Going freelance requires no business plan (though it should, in my opinion), and no organizational structure at all. You are on your own, and you do everything, so why should you sit down and list your roles?
Because that is exactly how you spot the work nobody assigned.
The Gerger exercise that woke me up years ago is to draw the org chart of your business, whatever its size, and then check that every role/function has a name in the box. Every single one. If there is cleaning to be done, that goes in too. If you work as a stylist, washing, sorting, packing, and shipping props from a shoot are part of the job, with a defined time and value.
Do this honestly, and two boxes will likely stay empty.
If you work inside a company, that is still your problem
Employment often doesn’t solve any of it. It relocates the negotiation (from you against your own calendar and beliefs to you against someone else’s budget), and it adds the comfortable illusion that the organization will handle both functions on your behalf. Sometimes it does. More often it does what is convenient for the organization this quarter, which is not the same as what keeps you employable.
Let’s look at the visibility side, since it is what people in certain cultures find uncomfortable.
Every employee is responsible for their own professional standing, and that means three unglamorous habits:
- Networking with colleagues, so that collaboration stays workable, and with contacts in other industries, where actual opportunities come from.
- Sharing what you read and what you think with peers and with management, which is what an involved approach to the business looks like in practice rather than in a performace review.
- Keeping your CV and your professional profile current, not when you start looking but continuously, because a profile updated in a hurry reads like one.
None of this is disloyalty to your employer. Someone whose competence is visible outside the building is worth even more inside it.
Then there is training, where most organizations are further ahead on paper than in practice.
Almost every company of any size has a learning budget, an annual allowance of days, or a statutory training entitlement, depending on the Country and the contract. In some places it is a legal obligation, elsewhere a line the people budget that quietly rolls over unused. Either way, there is usually something, and it usually goes to whoever asks first.
Where the company organizes training itself, your job is to make sure it is not only the mandatory compliance modules. Where nobody organizes anything, finding out what you are entitled to and building a plan falls to you:
- Go to the person you report to with a shortlist of topics based on the work you actually do and where your role is going. Don’t ask; present a proposal with two or three options.
- Once they have confirmed that the skills you want to acquire/hone are compatible with the team’s objectives, take that to HR or People Operations and claim the hour and/or the budget that exists.
- If you are allowed to stay on site during training, book a meeting room. If not, go to a library or somewhere equally neutral, not home.
The step people often skip is the first one, and it is the most effective. A manager asked to approve a solid plan behaves very differently from a manager asked to solve a problem.
Protect the time
Time for training and promotion doesn’t magically appear; it has to be made. You have to take it from something else, and then protect it, which is the part nobody warns you about.
Put learning in the calendar as an appointment, with its own color code and duration, and set the do not disturb setting to on, so that neither other people nor you can book over it.
Use a timer to make sure you stay focused and to stop the nagging feeling that you are stealing time from real work.
Be ruthless about sources, draw up a reading list at the start of the year, and ignore the panic and FOMO about the newest bestseller. Sign up for courses that build a skill tied to an existing goal for the year, not what you think might look good on your profile. Being selective about what you read might feel like arrogance, but it makes the task manageable and sustainable.
Personally, I hold the line better on learning than on promotion, and I suspect that is common. The return on learning is easier to see, and promoting your own work is easier to postpone. When the motivation to protect these activities runs out, ask yourself: could you still do your job at the top of your ability and at the level you want to be paid for without them? If the answer is no, then learning and promotion are work, and they should live inside working hours.
Cover image by Malvestida Magazine/Unsplash.
