An Introduction to Professional Development

Introduction

You would be suprised at how occasional, lightweight professional development can do wonders for your self esteem, before even influencing you tangibly. However, for most people the benefits are far greater than that; planned development will facilitate career progress, leading to greater job satisfaction. Many people will recognise the good brought about by professional development, even if it isn’t obvious early on. This article would like to try to bring those elements to your attention, while hopefully teaching you some new ones and some useful tips. Without PD, you are unlikely to be adaptable and, as all jobs and roles change over time, will find unnecessary difficulty at some stage.

What is Professional Development?

Professional Development is a wide ranging process that may be applied differently by everyone. The main points can be generalised as:

• The ability to recognise your current position and impression
• The ability to recognise your desired position and impression (be that through necessity or preference)
• The ability to recognise the steps needed to acheive your desired position, and break it down into competence, knowledge, skill, attribute etc.
• The ability to perform these steps, and gain the resources needed to acheive them.
• The ability to check that you are on track, or have arrived at your new position.

Note that there are a few distinctions that need to be made here. Position and impact may not be a role, it may be something personal like an attitude or ability. The steps may be a training course, personal learning, or activities that allow you to practice a behaviour. In doing so, you may discover that the resource is your mentor, friend, a technical book, funds - any number of varied items.

Essentially, what you have here is the process of constructively adding or changing your repertoire of tools that can be used professionally or personally. This very definition highlights the fact that individuals will each find different methods to be useful to them.

Who should do Professional Development?

In short, everyone. Here are some examples to help explain:

• Apprentice
  An apprentice is generally practising early engineering techniques, with a view to working in the profession with experience at a later stage. PD will allow them to get the most out of their apprenticeship by identifying what their short and long term goals are, and how to tailor their experiences to acheive them.
  
• Graduate
  A graduate enters the business with the essential foundations of their knowledge fully established. They need to gain experience and learn how their knowledge can be put into practice.
• Experienced Engineer
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• General Manager
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• Senior Manager
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• Director/Leader
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