Tailoring Professional Development Tools to Fit Your Needs

This chapter articulates the importance of professional development tools for the early career researcher. The chapter details a story about the author’s own experiences with learning skills relevant to improving one’s writing productivity. Along the way, the chapter conveys a key lesson about professional development, namely that attaining skills requires tailoring tools to the user’s scholarly process and daily life. Importantly, how this lesson manifested in the author’s own scholarly process revealed a potent professional development tool described later in the book (i.e., Chap. 4 ).