The impact of business travel on professional development

Abstract

This paper analyses how professional development and skills the workforce needs to acquire have transformed and evolved significantly over the years, and how business travel could be leveraged by organizations to promote the same. As a result of the current era of intense technology transformation and information availability, developing a professional career no longer focusses only on functional expertise and job knowledge. Nowadays the development of soft skills such as adaptability, flexibility, creativity and emotional intelligence is what organizations demand from their workers, and as such companies must adopt new strategies and methods to encourage these types of qualities. Business travel is one means that will allow workers to develop new skills. The correspondent study conducted showed that there is awareness of the needed transformation professional development is undergoing and how critical it is to improve likewise soft skills. In addition, it was determined that leveraging businesses travel could be a means to boost the development of soft skills particularly when facing unfamiliar circumstances and situations. Nevertheless, a direct relationship could not be confirmed as this study would have needed additional data and information about the respondent’s previous knowledge on the subject to properly confirm that correlation.