"Nobody else is going to build your career for you", says leadership coach Helena Sharpstone, so here is her practical model for taking charge of your own learning, whatever your organisation's training budget looks like.
At Fundraising Convention 2026, Helena Sharpstone, founder of leadership and development consultancy Sharpstone Skinner and former Head of Training at Help the Aged, ran a session aimed squarely at fundraisers early in their careers, though her message applies just as well to anyone who wants to keep growing.
Helena's starting point was simple - if you wait for your organisation to plan your development, you may be waiting a long time.
Owning that process yourself, rather than relying on a training budget or a formal programme, is what actually moves careers forward.
Helena has worked alongside fundraisers for almost three decades, and she has watched the profession's approach to learning shift considerably. In the early 1990s, training was patchy at best. Some charities built strong in-house programmes out of necessity, because nothing else existed, and the fundraisers who came through them often went on to lead teams and organisations themselves.
Since then, professional qualifications have raised the credibility and consistency of the profession, and the pandemic accelerated a shift towards flexible, online learning that has only continued since.
What has not changed is the fact that formal, structured training still is not guaranteed, whatever the size of your organisation. A good line manager and a supportive culture help enormously, but the responsibility for your own growth ultimately sits with you.
To help make that responsibility practical rather than daunting, Helena introduced the 70-20-10 model of learning, developed by the Centre for Creative Leadership and built on evidence from senior leaders describing how they actually became good at their jobs.
The proportions are a helpful guide rather than an exact science, but the pattern holds. Around 70 per cent of what we learn comes from direct experience, roughly 20 per cent from other people, and about 10 per cent from formal training.
Planning development in that order, starting with experience, then relationships, then courses, tends to produce far more useful growth than defaulting straight to a course.
This is where most learning happens - through projects, stretch assignments, job swaps, secondments and simply putting your hand up for things that are slightly outside your usual remit.
Volunteering, whether inside or outside your own organisation, was a theme fundraisers in the room returned to repeatedly, both for its own value and for what it reveals about how other teams and causes operate. Helena's advice was not to overwhelm yourself: a handful of well chosen opportunities, taken on when you have capacity, will do more for your development than trying to say yes to everything at once.
This covers coaching, mentoring, dedicated time with your manager, giving and receiving feedback, and the informal exchanges that happen when you are with colleagues.
Helena was candid that even a difficult manager offers something to learn from, since seeing an approach that does not work is often just as instructive as seeing one that does. Networking sits here too, in whatever form suits your own style, whether that is a wide circle of contacts or a smaller number of deeper professional relationships - both count.
Qualifications, courses, conferences, podcasts and structured learning make up the smallest share of the model, but Helena was clear that this is a powerful 10 per cent precisely because it is so visible and easy to point to.
Attending a conference, studying towards a professional qualification, or setting aside a day to properly watch sessions you missed all count. It does not need to relate directly to fundraising to be valuable. The learning itself is often transferable, even when the subject is not.
Helena's practical challenge to the room was to ask two questions against each of the three categories. What have you done already that fits here, even if you had not thought of it as development? And what more could you realistically do?
She also suggested a simple review after any learning experience:
Finally, she posed a longer term version of the same idea: what do you want to be able to add to your CV in twelve months' time that is not there now? Most of that answer, she noted, tends to come from the 70 per cent of experience, not the 10 per cent of formal training.
Fundraising is a skilled and rewarding job that makes a real difference, and the sector is working to help more people start, grow and stay in it through good training, qualifications and clear routes to progress.
Helena's model gives fundraisers, and particularly those earlier in their careers, a practical way to take ownership of that progress themselves rather than waiting for it to be handed down. Keeping good fundraisers matters just as much as recruiting new ones, and a fundraiser who feels able to build their own development, in a role, organisation or team of any size, is more likely to stay, grow, and eventually help develop the next generation of colleagues in turn.
Fundraisers can find more career development opportunities here, and CIOF members have further training and development guidance and resources available through the Member Portal.
(Please note that the video below shows you the slides from the session with the audio recorded from the speakers)
AI disclosure statement - This article was created using the support of AI, based on the transcript from the session recording. It has been reviewed, edited and approved by a member of CIOF staff and the speakers mentioned in this article.
