Reviewing Your Professional Development
Review is the start and the finish!
Most projects and plans start with a thorough review of
the current situation: professional development is no exception. The review
stage appears at the beginning and the end of the Professional Development
Cycle because you need to be aware of where you are before you start, and
because it is important to check regularly where you are in order to keep going
in the right direction. It is a critical part of the process, and deserves
serious time and effort.
This is the same type of thinking process that you would
probably employ in preparation for your appraisal at work or for a job
interview, i.e. considering your strengths, your weaknesses and any future
opportunities or threats.
The most important aspect of reviewing your learning is
thinking about what you have learned. This reflection - on what happened, what
you understood from the experience, the new knowledge and skills you have
gained, and how these will contribute to your improved future performance - is
where we gain real benefit from our learning experiences. Only once we have
gone through this process, is the information in a form that we can readily
store away (both in our minds and our records), and that we can recall for
future use.
Even if you are not planning a ‘formal’ review
just yet, taking regular time out to reflect on your learning is important.
Reflection will help you formulate your experiences in such a way that they can
be recorded easily; and it important that this is done regularly, so that you
don’t forget the details. Once recorded, you may keep your notes for a
more formal review.
Obviously you will need to do a thorough review of your
current position before you can possibly begin to plan to make changes.
Equally, once you have started, your development must be reviewed regularly.
This will:
- demonstrate achievements against your original targets,
- ensure you are still progressing in the right direction,
- allow you to focus and define your learning for the next period,
- give you an opportunity to review your long-term goals, taking account of
any changes in your circumstances.
It is at these times that you should re-evaluate your
targets and make any necessary modifications to your plans.
How frequently a review should be carried out and the
date this should be done will depend on a number of factors and may be very
personal. When setting a review date you must consider whether your objectives
are short-, medium- or long-term.
Clearly, the frequency must depend on the time frame
envisaged. It would be pointless to review a set of end-month objectives only
annually, while there can be more flexibility about longer-term ones. You may
find it useful to carry out some sort of review every month to see whether you
have met your short-term objectives and are on course for the longer-term ones
so that any corrective actions can be considered. One year should be considered
the maximum period for an in-depth review. Much will depend on the rapidity
with which your work and responsibilities are changing, and the range of
competences you are developing at any one time.
- Short-term plan - review the individual targets that you set, and remove
them or transfer them onto your next plan as appropriate. Add new goals from
your appraisals or medium-term plan, to build your targets for the next period.
This review should be regular - say every 2 - 6 months.
- Medium-term plan - review progress against medium-term goals. These goals
may be broken down into sections, and it may be possible to tick off some of
these. Amend your plan to include any new ideas that may have arisen. This plan
should be reviewed at least every year.
- Long-term plan -check that this plan is still realistic, and
add/remove/change any items as necessary. It is likely that this plan
won’t change dramatically, but should still be reviewed annually.
There may be other times in your life when it will be
particularly important to review your professional development.
1) External changes, constraints and opportunities
Do carry out a review at any points of change, e.g.
changes of responsibility, location or employer. Not only do you need to
account for the changes themselves in the development plans, probably adding
and subtracting topics at the detailed level, but you must also take account of
the broader effects on your career aims and directions, not forgetting the
implications for your personal objectives.
You may like to think of the regular review and updating
of your CV as part of this process. Any change of circumstances - or
consideration of other job opportunities - should trigger a review of your CV
and, if nothing else, will act as a quasi-review process.
2) Appraisal
It is convenient to plan for a review to coincide with
formal (annual or half-yearly) appraisals. This not only meets your
employer’s planning cycle, but allow you to be fully prepared to derive
value from the exercise, to take on board any suggestions for change and to
incorporate these rapidly into your plans.
Find out more about Appraisals.
3) Professional registration
Your professional development may be directly linked to
gaining professional registration. If this is the case, then many of your goals
will be linked to the specific competences required to achieve that. Once you
have attained your goal, you will need to conduct a thorough review and set new
goals. Remember though, that membership of your institution may include an
obligation to maintain your competence and, if so, you will need to ensure that
your new plans and future reviews take account of this.
4) Shelf life of learning/evidence
If you are working towards professional registration, or
other competence-based qualifications, you will need to set regular dates to
review your portfolio of evidence. Your competence, and the evidence that
proves it, only has a limited life. It follows that you will need to keep
ensuring that your portfolio is up-to-date.
Find out more about Evidence Shelf
Life.
Start by taking a metaphorical step back and taking a
good look at where you are. It may help to ask yourself some questions, and to
give yourself some honest and considered answers. Some of the questions you
might ask yourself are:
- How far have I gone towards achieving the targets I set myself?
- What improvements have I realised through my activities?
- How can I use my new knowledge and skill?
- Have my long-term plans been affected?
- Do I need to make any changes or modifications?
- What trends have emerged that might affect my plans?
Look back at your Development Action Plan, or your last
appraisal, and see how many of the targets you have achieved. If you have
completed a task fully, then remove it from your plan. (You may like to keep a
note of it, though - perhaps in a ‘completed development’ log - so
that you can look back and see your progress over time.) If you have only
partly completed a task, you might like to update your plan with a re-phrased
goal to reflect the parts still to be done.
If you are failing to achieve your goals, ask yourself
why? Is it because your goals were too big, or unrealistic? Or have other
circumstances taken over? If this is the case, re-evaluate and reset your goals
in such a way that you will be able to achieve them over the next period.
Consider how you have reached your achievements. Did you
take a planned approach or was it more opportunistic? Has your approach helped
or hindered the achievement of your goals? It may be that you need to change
the way you tackle your professional development in order to achieve more, or
to meet particular targets.
Your manager or mentor will be ideally placed to help you
review. This is particularly so if you are using your work appraisal to set
your targets. However, if you are adopting a more informal or personal
approach, you might like to talk to your colleagues for their feedback on how
you are improving (or with ideas for the future). Friends and family can also
provide a valuable input to your reviews.
Measuring progress can seem difficult, particularly in
these days when individual employees do very different jobs, even within the
same department. This can mean that there are no obvious benchmarks against
which you can compare yourself.
One place to start is your development action plan. You
can simply measure progress by looking at the number of goals you have
achieved. If, however, you want to measure your current ability against
external standards, you will need to identify those standards. Find out more
about Standards.
Another way to measure your progress is through
assessment. This can be formal, through examination or peer review, or
informal, when you assess yourself against specific measurements. Formal
assessments might take the form of gaining a qualification through examination
by an external body, or testing, such as psychometrics or skills and knowledge
tests.
Peer review, whilst obviously not as objective as an
examination, can be a two-way process, giving you valuable feedback, and
guidance. You might ask for a formal review with your manager, mentor, or
personnel department.
Many people find self-assessment the most difficult way
to measure progress. We all find it difficult to assess ourselves, particularly
when we don’t have good examples against which to compare. However, if you
have chosen appropriate standards, and you are fair and objective in your
measurement, you may find this a very enlightening exercise. Ask a friend,
colleague or your manager/mentor, to verify your assessment if you wish.
Find out more about self-assessment of
competence.
Learning is a very individual thing. This is demonstrated
by the fact that different people will gain widely differing things from the
same learning event. This is fine when we are aiming to improve our personal
competence, and it will contribute to intellectual ‘wealth’ of our
organisation.
However, organisations really gain when people share
their knowledge, and this is an important contributor to business success. As
an example, when one project team learns a new technique which adds to their
performance, they are able to use it to increase their performance on the next
project. However, if they are to share that learning, every project team in the
organisation will improve next time.
Organisations have adopted many ways of helping their
employees to share learning, from intranet-based forums, through to action
learning groups. Adopting a matrix organisation for project teams in another
method, ensuring people ‘swap’ teams regularly and therefore spread
their experience. These simple but effective methods of capturing learning lead
to improved working practices, cross fertilisation of ideas and thinking, and
facilitates the development of new ideas and implementation of changing
technology. In addition, it has a direct affect on the development of younger
team members, helping them be better performers and become the experts of the
future.
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