Professional development

This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (August 2008)

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (August 2008)

Professional development often refers to verbal and tactile skills required for maintaining a specific career path or to general skills offered through continuing education, including the more general skills area of personal development. It can be seen as training to keep current with changing technology and practices in a profession or in the concept of lifelong learning.

The term professional development encompasses all types of facilitated learning opportunities, for example, those that result in college credit or degrees as well as those that generally are less intensive and do not yield credits or degrees; those that occur largely through formal coursework and those that are more informal and situated in practice. There are a variety of approaches to professional development, including consultation, coaching, communities of practice, lesson study, mentoring, reflective supervision and technical assistance.^[1]

Developing and implementing a program of professional development is often a function of the human resources or organization development department of an organization.

Overview

In a broad sense professional development may include formal types of vocational education, typically post-secondary or polytechnical training leading to qualification or a credential required to get or retain employment. Professional development may also come in the form of pre-service or in-service professional development programs. These programs may be formal or informal, group or individualized.

Professional development on the job may develop or enhance process skills, sometimes referred to as leadership skills, as well as task skills. Some examples for process skills are 'effectiveness skills', 'team functioning skills', and 'systems thinking skills'. Some examples of task skills are computer software applications, customer service skills and safety training.

Examples of skills relevant to a current occupation are leadership training for managers and training for specific techniques or equipment for educators, technicians, metal workers, medical practitioners and engineers. For some occupations there is a provision for accreditation tied to "continuing professional education" and proving competence regulated by a professional body.

Professional development in health care involves developing workers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes in order to ensure that they can work confidently and effectively. This includes providing training, mentoring and supervision opportunities, as well as creating and maintaining organisational structures which support both individual and team performance. Proactive professional development ensures the creation of a learning culture in the workplace, increasing individual and team competence, confidence and morale, thus resulting in a more effective health care service.

Approaches to Professional Development

Professional development opportunities can range from a single workshop to a semester-long academic course, to services offered by a medley of different professional development providers and varying widely with respect to the philosophy, content, and format of the learning experiences. Some examples of approaches to professional development include:^[2]

• Consultation - to assist an individual or group of individuals to clarify and address immediate concerns by following a systematic problem-solving process.
• Coaching - to enhance a person’s competencies in a specific skill area by providing a process of observation, reflection, and action.
• Communities of Practice - to improve professional practice by engaging in shared inquiry and learning with people who have a common goal
• Lesson Study - to solve practical dilemmas related to intervention or instruction through participation with other professionals in systematically examining practice
• Mentoring - to promote an individual’s awareness and refinement of his or her own professional development by providing and recommending structured opportunities for reflection and observation
• Reflective Supervision - to support, develop, and ultimately evaluate the performance of employees through a process of inquiry that encourages their understanding and articulation of the rationale for their own practices
• Technical Assistance - to assist individuals and their organization to improve by offering resources and information, supporting networking and change efforts

Another form of professional development is customer training. An example of customer training is an after sales service aiming to guarantee proper usage of the equipment, system or technology delivered by a firm. Customer training is often categorized under Value-added service activities, yet it is commonly considered also as an obligation. Customer training is needed for example when a company delivers a modern paper machine to factory to replace an old one. To guarantee the full functionality of the delivery, the company has to deliver required skills and competence for the customer's site managers and operators.

Requirement Examples (U.S.)

In the United States, many states have professional development requirements for school teachers pre-kindergarten through grade 12. For example, in New Jersey, state regulations mandate that all active teachers and educational services personnel in New Jersey complete 100 hours of professional development every five years, consistent with the New Jersey Professional Development Standards. In the state of Florida, instructional personnel must earn 120 inservice hours or 2 college courses every 5 years in each area of certification. Arkansas teachers are required to complete 60 hours of professional development each year. As a portion of the required 60 hours, 2 hours must be in parental involvement, 2 hours in Arkansas history and 6 hours in technology education. Professional development standards are becoming a legislated mandate in a number of states in the USA. In the state of Florida, each district is reviewed every three years to ensure that professional development meets standards in the areas of planning, delivery, follow-up and evaluation.

The legal profession in the United States and some other countries has professional development requirements as well.

See also

• Apprenticeship
• Career
• Continuing Professional Development
• Core competency
  • Competency evaluation
• Initial Professional Development
• Induction training
• Licensure
• Mentor
• Organizational Dissent
• Profession
• Training and development
• Vocational education

External links

• The National Professional Development Center on Inclusion
• The UK Initial Professional Development (IPD) Forum
• Welcome to Professional Development - How 2
• Wiki: Help Define Approaches to Professional Development

References