Professional Development

Definition

Professional Development is all about how a person can improve their character and personality based on their profession and career. This may suit to any random person operating or working in any firm or even for a college or school student. In short it is all about personal development.

Professional development basically involves diversified educational experiences related to ones work. People involved in high level professions and engaged in businesses participate in professional development to learn and apply new knowledge and skills to enhance their performance, contribution and reaching their goals.

http://learningforward.org/docs/pdf/why_pd_matters_web.pdf?sfvrsn=0

Purpose

The primary purpose of professional development is to increase the effectiveness of all who are engaged in a particular profession together with their required knowledge, skills and abilities. This will better suit if the working place provides a positive environment which will encourage and establish the necessary developmental mechanisms and steps for each participant to improve themselves according to their requirements. It is also important that this development in once profession creates a beneficial impact on the clients as well, since they will be the target of the professionals. 

www.nashua.edu/district.../2360%20professional%20development.pdf

Techniques

Professional development can be achieved in many ways like study and research, additional graduate study in the discipline, participation in professional meetings, and in-service training such as instruction in computer usage. A persons skills and abilities related to his profession can be also brought out by encouragement of innovation and improvement of instruction by a recognition system like presenting outstanding awards in ones work place, providing financial support to encourage researches and inventions, organizing workshops, short courses and seminars which are designed to develop new skills in instruction, research and public services.

http://ww2.nscc.edu/inservice/definition.htm


It is also important for the respective institution to give an opportunity for their staff to continue their professional development in their entire career, because there is always room to develop once ability according to the immediate changes that occur. Demonstration on how developments occur with time is also a very effective method to construct one’s self in an efficient manner. Each institution should plan and implement on an annual basis a structured, coordinated program for faculty development. The program should be designed to achieve predetermined institutional objectives, and should utilize an appropriate variety of activities.

• Personal Learning Network 

It is a technique of professional development where an individual learner depending on his specific needs and interests extends his ideas and views to relevant learners including people who are interested in the same field or topic, scholars in that field all over the world. PLN provides an opportunity to associate with experts, leaders and professionals in the particular field in a wide scale bringing everyone to gather to develop each others’ knowledge further.

http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2008/04/5-things-you-can-do-to-begin-developing.html

• Professional Development Portfolio 

This technique is very useful to assess ones strengths, developmental activities and experiences in professional development. It is an overall view of the above stated segments which will help a person to identify and build one’s strengths, focus on the targets of the profession in which the person is engaged, develops the skills in such a way to suit in the upcoming career in the way one desires. 

http://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/4E832784-B294-4B93-B63C-D5647280666C/0/CGT_Online_TDA_ProfessionalDevelopmentCareerPortfolio.pdf

Some of the other techniques such as SWOT Analysis and Time management are there in my previous posts.