Personal and Professional Development - Assignment Example

5). This provides wider scope and opportunities for the individual to look at his own career progress from a wider perspective and takes measures that can help him improve his professional skills and abilities. There are various other types of training and development, such as job or workplace training and development. These are related to promoting and improving skills and capabilities of a person in relation to his workplace environment and his job specification. Alsop (2000, p. 1) defined Continuing Professional Development as an educational process by which people put efforts to maintain and enhance professional competence from a wider perspective.

Often, both CPD and lifelong learning are used interchangeably. From the business point of view, there are various types of on-the-job as well as the off-the-job training and all these different types of training are considered to be critical components of professional development. Often termed as organizational development, Human Resource Management gives greater significance to imparting specific training and development programs with a view to foster the skills, abilities, knowledge, wisdom, experience and ultimately the productivity of employees required to make them fit for a particular job task.

But, in contrast, a person who attempts to carry out CPD will certainly think in a wider perspective and thinks about developing the overall skills and abilities required for him to improve his professional skills, rather than required for a specific job. As Mackay (2007, p. 185) emphasized that Continuing Professional Development is a personal commitment to keeping one’s professional knowledge up to date and keeping on improving his professional abilities. As part of gaining such ongoing professional development, most people keep on updating their CVs, ensuring professional recognition, showcasing their achievements, accelerating career prospects and ensuring greater work satisfaction.

Following are the major factors that explain why CPD is different from other types of training and development In CPD, the learner is in a free thinking and free-working aspirations where as the learner in almost all other types of development programs is in control. For instance, an employee working as a machine operator who is attending a development program in a technology company will be under the control and pressure of his manager to get accustomed with the working conditions in his business organization.

CPD is considered to be a holistic process and therefore it can address various aspects of life and value-elements related the society or family in general. In CPD, people will be promoted to think how they want to be and evaluating how they are performing. People also will be prompted to look forward about working from the current situation toward the future direction. In almost all other types of training and development, people are thinking only about the present job, performance in that particular job, managers’ or superiors’ feedback related to that specific job etc.

With continuing professional development, individuals are becoming responsible for controlling and managing their own development and career-success. But in other types of development, not only they but also managers or those who give training and development to them are also responsible for their professional deve