Personal and Professional Development - Report Example

Personal and Professional Development (PPD) Name: Course: Instructor: Institution: Date of Submission: Summary Self-managed learning is the process of learning using a different strategies to learn different things. Self-managed learning is beneficial to an individual’s life-long success in both personal and professional contexts. That is; an individual becomes responsible and dedicated to handling different crucial duties that improve success and development in different ways. For instance, when one engages in a self-managed learning process, they become aware of their strengths and limits. Thus, when making decisions, the individuals become aware of their limits. Thus, their competencies and strengths can be used to ensure they grow in their given fields. More importantly, it develops the process of attaining and developing realistic goals, including one’s competitiveness, which supports the personal and professional development plan. It helps in minimizing issues linked to personal and professional fields, leading to major benefits. The report presents how self-managed learning will be used to improve, one’s personal and professional development. The report shows how self-managed learning is the key to attaining and improving one’s personal and professional development. Report Analysis The personal and professional development plan was developed to improve and guarantee lifelong success. Self-managed learning involves learning and making the necessary changes through reflection to improve one’s success. Through reflection, one gains an important insight on their strengths and limits. Through self-managed learning, which also includes reflection of the activities engaged in, one learns to identify the important issues in their lives. Self-managed learning is attained through many different learning strategies such as feedback, so one should learn to ask for honest feedback to improve their ways. This activities were attained also through experience, and internships, where all were used as platforms for learning. Below is a personal and professional development plan that was created prior to engaging in certain self-managed learning activities. The Professional and Personal Development Plan (Original) What do I want/need to learn? (specific and realistic) Where was this need identified? What will I do to achieve this? (achievable) What resources or support will I need? (awareness of limitations and opportunities) What will my success criteria be? (measurable) Target dates for review and completion (time constrained) *Engineering Skills *Engineering PHD certifications This was identified in my early years when I learned and decided on what I want to study *Educational learning *Self-managed learning *Training and engaging in internships to learn about the goals To participate in school projects and others to attain the educational learning requirements needed. Engage in internships to gain more knowledge and training to attain these goals Define my goals and set timeframes to determine what has been achieved. That is; I will compare my goals with what I have achieved to determine the success attained. The time frame is divided for long and short term goals. The short term goals timeframe is three months for each goals set. The long term goal is the timeframe for the entire course, which is about five years Self-assessment/ evaluation also refers to the personal assessment process of evaluating one’s values and personalities to improve and determine the personal characteristics that influences the decision making processes. The self-evaluation process helps in identifying my strengths and weaknesses, which increases my awareness on my limits and inner resources that increase my personal and professional lifelong success. The plan presented above is the original personal and professional development plan. Self-evaluation process was conducted through the self-managed lifelong learning process. Personal and professional development process relies highly on self-managed learning, as well as self-evaluation (Goleman, et al., 2002). The plan was developed through a clear identification of the personal traits, supported by professional traits that help in presenting the lifelong learning advantage to achieve the set goals. Self-managed learning is reflected on the performance of the personal and professional goals. To formulate the personal and professional development plan; self-managed learning was used where I learned to pay attention to increase one’s competency in the job field to gain and increase the professional success. Self-managed learning helped in setting up my goals that are realistic, by determining the opportunistic approach and goals, including skills and competencies to use. Learning was conducted by learning from friends, the environment, team members and experience among many other aspects (Moon, 2013). Through self-managed learning long and short term goals were set. The long term goal identified was the Engineering Skill Competencies. That is; my goal is to achieve A PhD level in Engineering through meeting all the necessary educational requirements. Thus, I had to set other short term goals involved in personal and professional development. Thus, the short term goals include activities that will help in meeting and attaining the long-term goal. The short term activities include attaining and improving skills such as work experience, integrity, organizational skills, designing skills, communication skills, knowledge gap, technical skills, written and verbal English as well as problem solving skills. The personal skills to attain and improve on short term goals include self-awareness, feedback appraisal, communication, listening skills, conflict handling skills, negotiation skills, self-management skills, time management, team working and leadership skills. Self-managed learning has improved my self-awareness skills through an activity conducted sometime back. The activity helped in identifying my strengths and limitations that influence my lifelong success in attaining my set long-term goals. The self-evaluation process involved engaging in self-managed learning to identify the strengths and limitations linked to each and how they help in attaining my lifelong goals and successes. Discussion The first personal development activity conducted was the self-awareness development. Self-awareness is the process of one been aware of the emotions that affect both personal and professional development mainly in making judgements. The activity involved engaging in experiences to understand how different emotions affect my judgements and decision making process. Emotional intelligence affects the success of attaining the professional goals and develop successful leaders. The self-awareness skill improvement activity was conducted to engage in an awareness of my emotions, how they developed, and the causes and consequences of emotions. Results of the activity show that my emotions are manageable. That is; stressful work and school situations do not affect my judgment and decision making process. However, personal emotions have a negative impact on my decision making. When I have personal stress I often have challenges in making logical decisions. So I learned I need to learn to distance my personal emotions from my professional activities to guarantee success in the professional area. On the other hand, if it is challenging to distance the emotions I should learn to manage my personal emotions since they affect my decision making in all areas of my life. Through reflective learning, and experienced learning, and feedback, I learned through self-managed learning my emotions are an important part of my personal and professional development in the future. For instance, after engaging in the self-awareness skill activity, I changed my personal and professional development plan since, I had to change my goals by avoiding blind ambitions and relentless hard work that may not improve my lifelong development. I changed my personal and professional development to a more and better plan that recognizes the need of personal skills in relation to my engineering skills to ensure my future success and development. I also learned my self-awareness skills through gaining feedback. I had feedback from my team members, the line managers and friends. Some of the feedback was positive, while others were negative. Positive and negative feedback is a way of learning that helps one identify their emotional skills strengths and limitations. On understanding my emotions, I learned the emotions that trigger the process of making wrong decisions, and other emotions that do not affect the process of making logical decisions. I need to learn to make decisions without involving emotions, to ensure lifelong success is attained. However, I also learned that feedback can be attained in form of results gained from experience and other assessments such as exams among others. Feedback can also be attained from teachers, coaches, colleagues, business managers, acquaintances and mentors among many others (Back, 2003). The evaluation also includes an analysis of the educational skill activities. The process involves engaging in educational activities and assessments that evaluate my gained learning skills. The assessment involves empowering me with educational requirements to help in achieving my goal. However, to meet my goal, self-managed learning was to be employed, which led to the development of the plan provided below. Through observation, I learned how different factors affect my emotions, and wrote down the performance and evaluation. I also learned through experience, which led to the major learning experience given through feedback (Koprowska, 2010). I engaged in various projects in school where feedback was given by my friends, school mates and teachers. Where I strengthened on the positive feedback, while on the negative feedback I made changes to increase to improve them to ensure they also help in my success. More importantly, I became aware of my strengths and limits, which increases my chances to improve my lifelong development. On the other hand, experienced learning also occurred through internships I learned various from team members and line managers. They gave feedback on the educational requirements I should improve on and meet to increase my success in the field. Updated Personal and Professional Development plan What do I want/need to learn? (specific and realistic) Where was this need identified? What will I do to achieve this? (achievable) What resources or support will I need? (awareness of limitations and opportunities) What will my success criteria be? (measurable) Target dates for review and completion (time constrained) Engineering and personal skills that will help in my professional development This was identified after I started my personal and professional development, which led to the recognition of the importance of such personal skills besides engineering What I intend to do to achieve this goal is first implement different activities and skills as noted in the original personal and development plan. Engage in internships to gain knowledge and experience, through experience and feedback I will improve on major skills such as self-awareness development activities. Conflict management development and many others Set educational goals such as the grade that I intend to attain. The internship I intend to attain to gain experience of at least two years before completing my course The timeframe to achieve my goals and the engineering skills I require is equal to the timeframe my course will consume to complete. The plan presented above is an outcome of my educational and self-awareness activities. The plan presents that though self-managed learning, I discovered the role of my emotions and educational success in my lifelong professional development, as well as personal development (Morgenstern, 2004). Self-awareness contributes to the personal and professional development. The experience helped recognizing the skills regarding emotions to be improved, by enlightening on the gaps to be realized. Conclusion Self-managed learning is an important activity to engage in for the future development of life-long success. Other than the self-awareness activity, I will engage in other self-managed activities to increase my personal and professional development. Thus, based on the evaluation based above, I need to engage in training and other learning strategies such as more internships and apprenticeships, as well as other educational strategies that include furthering my educational goals to meet my long-term goals. The long-term goals include achieving an engineering PhD, which will increase not only my personal success, but also the professional development. Recommendations I recommend engaging in various self-managed activities for the PPD lifelong success. I will set a plan to engage in self-managed learning for all different professional and personal skills identified above. All the activities will include engaging in a timely planned development plan to ensure I improve on all my skills that help in achieving my long-term goals. Thus, all short-term goals will be attained through self-managed learning activities of the given goals. References Back, D., 2003. Interpersonal Skills in Organizations with Management Skill Booster Passcard. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. & McKee, A., 2002. Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence.. Harvard Business School Press, p. 93. Koprowska, J., 2010. Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Social Work. 3 ed. New York: Sage Publishers. Moon, J. A., 2013. Reflection in learning and professional development: Theory and practice. New York: Routedge. Morgenstern, J., 2004. Time Management from the Inside Out. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 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