Reference no: EM133590504 , Length: word count:3000

Professional Development for the Workplace

Succeeding in your first graduate role or in an internship involves a great deal of self-directed learning and initiative and involves a high degree of individual choice. To gain maximum benefit from these experiences, careful thought and planning are required. Your Professional Development Plan incorporates the formal stages of your career planning process. It is a practical exercise with personal benefits - a real-life self-management strategy to assist you in obtaining a suitable employment/internship position and developing your career. You can write in first person. However, you should remember that this is a university assessment and not a descriptive story. It is expected that you apply theoretical knowledge to a practical situation and demonstrate critical reflection and critical thinking.

Your Professional Development Plan should include the following components:

Executive summary

Remember that an executive summary of a report is just that, a summary. It contains:
- a statement of report purpose
- an overview of the actual and specific findings.

For this assessment, it should be no longer than one to two pages (and is NOT included in your total word count for this assessment). The summary can only be written after you have completed your report. Write in ‘past' tense (e.g. The purpose of this report was to ... ). If an executive summary is well written, the reader should be able to understand the main points, findings, and conclusions of the actual report without having to read the full report.

Table of contents
Ensure that each heading number, heading and page number is included and is professionally laid out. The easiest and most professional way to do this is to use the Microsoft Word feature that automatically creates a table of contents for you.

Section 1 - Introduction
Include a brief overview of what you are about to discuss and the order in which you will do this.

Section 2 - Self-awareness
This section should demonstrate a solid self-awareness and discuss your career-related strengths and weaknesses. Your discussion should focus on the following Organisational Behaviour (OB) factors (approximately two paragraphs for each):

2.1 Personality
What insights have you obtained about your personality, for example from personality models such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the Big Five personality model? (Module 3)

2.2 Values and Motivators
What are your most important values and motivators? (Modules 3 & 4)

2.3 Emotional intelligence
What are your emotional intelligence abilities? (Module 3)

2.4 Leadership
What is your leadership aspiration and potential (or demonstrated ability)? (Module 5)

2.5 Power and Politics
What are your approaches to power, politics and influence? (Module 5)

Your self-awareness section needs to be written in the context of your career planning. How will each of the above factors influence your career decisions and aspirations? Link this discussion to the results of your Profiling for Success Type at Work Indicator report. Additionally, you may wish to include results of other relevant self-awareness tools, approaches or discoveries you have made about yourself during your reading or activities for this unit.

Section 3 - Opportunity awareness
Another important component of career planning is opportunity awareness, which is concerned with knowledge of the world of work and training. Your discussion should focus on the concept of career and explore industry sectors and occupational positions that you are interested in.

3.1 My career
Describe how you visualise your perfect internship/graduate position and broader career. Critically evaluate how your descriptions compare and contrast with the literature covered in this unit relating to definitions of careers, career management and career success (Modules 1 & 4) (1-2 paragraphs). As part of your evaluation consider the different elements of critical thinking to ensure:
•
o firstly, you understand your underlying assumptions
o secondly, you understand the contexts that have shaped your image
o thirdly, you are aware of potential alternatives
o finally, that you ask lots of questions to assist you in evaluating all sources of information.

3.2 Industry sector
Provide a brief summary of the industry sector that you want to be working in, either for your internship or upon graduation (1 paragraph), and refer to an Appendix containing your completed Industry Sector career analysis.

3.3 Mentoring
Discuss the benefits and challenges of having a career mentor and reflect on your experience to date in the Bright Futures Mentoring program (2 paragraphs).

Section 4 - Decision making and planning
This next section addresses how to actually go about making decisions relevant to career planning or development. Refer to the literature on Problem Solving and Decision Making and critically evaluate how an understanding of these theories can be of assistance to the decision-making and problem-solving processes you will be using when seeking your internship/graduate employment (Modules 4 & 5). You must compare and contrast at least two approaches/ theories (approximately 3-4 paragraphs).
Your discussion should identify factors that will be important in your internship/graduate position decision such as the geographic location, paid/unpaid nature, opportunities for training and development, opportunity for ongoing employment, and so forth.

Section 5 - Goals
Setting goals (both short and long-term) is important in career planning. Challenging, but realistic goals can have a powerful positive influence on career success (see Module 4). Briefly discuss the importance of goal setting for professional development and refer to an Appendix containing your three career-related goals.

Section 6 - Conclusion
Within this section restate the purpose of the report, then provide an overview of the main points covered in your analysis. Ensure that you do not include any new information, only that which has been discussed within the main body of the report.

Reference list
A recommended 7-10 well-integrated reference sources is required. You may use your Profiling for Success report and results from other self-assessment quizzes that you have used as references. Harvard referencing style is required. Access the Harvard Referencing guide through the library webpage.