Professional Development Plan

Professional Development Plan

A professional development plan can be defined as a list of all the steps required to be taken for one to achieve his/her career goal. It helps one to gain the specific insight on how he/she could reach their career aspirations such as getting a mentor who can help in advice someone or through earning a new certification (Rubens et al. 2018). Professional development plan highlights the objectives, the goals, competency development and required skill that a staff member requires to support the continuous career development and improvement. Every staff member within an organization requires a living professional development plan, and the planning should always take place when it noted that a specific staff member needs improvement. This paper is a professional development plan of Hellen, a staff member who works at HESTA company for the past six months.

Hellen is the Marketing Team Leader at HESTA who possess some skills which put her in the position she already has within the organization. She is hardworking, and this can be proven by the fact that she has been working full time at the organization for six months. She has excellent experience, which she gained from her previous work at a Marketing agency in Ontario, making her a valued team member within HESTA. She is a single mother who has a five years son who started his primary education, and it is becoming hard for her to provide him with appropriate after school care for him. She also faces another challenge at work of some members of her team at work is being unhappy with her holding the position which they think it should have been them who were assigned her position. She is leading a team of very experienced professionals which also is a challenge to her.

Despite all the challenges that Hellen faces, she has her own goals that she aims at achieving and these goals include leading her team into the achievement of the team’s goals and objectives and to ensure that her team serves the assigned responsibilities by the organization. Hellen aims at providing her son and family with the appropriate care and love required and expected from a mother. Hellen is aimed at ensuring that she has an excellent work relationship with all the members of her team and ensure that they are happy with her holding the position that she holds. Hellen is also aimed at ensuring she gives the best and works smartly since she is a leader of very experienced professionals and to ensure it is not a challenge to her she has to outsmart them and ensure that she manages all the professionals effectively..

HESTA is an Australian based organization that is committed to changing the future of the planet and the people in it. The aim of the organization is the best possible performance for its members while at the same time minimizing the risk. The organization is dedicated to people in health as well as community services. They are committed to creating better futures for their members, women as well as all the Australians. Hellen’s personal goals, to some extent, aligns to HESTA’s purposes and vision indirectly. Hellen aims are being the best leader among her team members since they are all very experienced professionals who are good at what they do the same situation for the purposes and vision of HESTA company where it is dedicated to people in health as well as community services. Hellen is dedicated to serving all the professions in her team the same way HESTA is dedicated to the people it helps. Hellen aims at eliminating all challenges she faces and at the same time, lead her team members into achieving the goals and objectives of the team to the organization. This personal goal of Helen is the same as the organization’s vision and purposes of creating a better future for the people of the planet despite what challenges that the organization faces.

The organization offers professional development opportunities that could be helpful to Hellen in achieving her personal goals and becoming a developing her skills as the marketing team leader. HESTA has challenges which through specific profession developments could be solved. Since the organization is focused on offering benefits that its members want by giving them the right to take control of their future, advice and quality education concerning super has enabled the organization to trust of all their members allowing them to keep their services pertinent to their needs. The professional development opportunities available at HESTA, therefore, are the new projects and responsibilities, workshops and seminars, mentorship as well as educational opportunities.

Since the organization has many new projects and responsibilities which are created by other professionals within the organization who try to come up with strategies and ways that would improve the performance of HESTA now and in the future, these may be opportunities for Helen to gain some knowledge on how she would ensure that the responsibilities are given to her, and her team members are achieved effectively. She will learn some of the essential steps that she may undertake to increase the output of her team. Mentorship may help Helen in gaining some leadership skills which will enable her to deal with the unhappy members of her team. She will learn how to make every member of the team like her after another individual mentor her may be of higher rank within the organization.

Maybe it could be the higher board of directors and managers of the organization. Educational opportunities available within HESTA may equip Helen with the necessary skills which will enable her to balance her home responsibilities to her family and work. She will increase her leadership skills to allow her to manage her expanded roles of serving the very professional members of her team. The organization has workshops and seminars which may be great opportunities for Helen to know the organizational goals and therefore use the skills employed by other staff members within the organization to come up with better ways and strategies that she and her team could apply to improve their outcome to the organization.

Helen’s goals can be achieved through different ways; one is that she needs to create an effective planning where she will have to find an opportunity or time to spend with her family. Effective working plan can help Helen achieve her goal of wanting to have some after school care for her son. She may plan to always ensure that by the time her son leaves school, she was free to spend some time with him or find a house help who would take care of her son after school. To be able to get along with her teammates, Helen will require a strategy where everyone in the team feels happy to be part of it; she should motivate her teammates, she can also encourage a high level of participation or employ the participatory leadership whereby everyone in the group has to actively participate, and there is no one important than the others.

Treating everyone equally and giving all members of the group the freedom and opportunity to share their opinions may help improve her relationship with the members of the team. To achieve her personal goal of wanting to drive or lead the side towards the achievement of the responsibilities given to them by the organization, Helen should improve her and her team members’ communication, decision-making, reliability, conflict resolution, problem solving, persuasion and influencing, rapport-building and listening, organization and planning skills. When the entire team possess all these skills, it means that the team will be very productive, efficient and effective to HESTA.

To achieve her personal goal of being smart and effective in her role as a team leader, Hellen requires to ensure that she is updated with every trending business news and considering that she leads a marketing team, she should ensure she is aware of all the different tastes of the Australian people. She should ensure that she is aware of all the competitors in the market, the strategies different competitors are using, how she could ensure that competition is never a problem to her and her team, she also have to employ unique techniques and strategies with all these plus the team management skills will make her start and perfect in her role as the team leader of very experienced professionals.

Motivation is the experience of aversion or desire, and it’s a very significant fact to the functionality of any organization or business. To be motivated means to be moved by something. One individual who feels no inspiration or impetus to act ways that he/she is unmotivated. Motivated individuals are those who remain activated and energized to the end. Motivation can be either extrinsic motivation which is the motivation that comes from outside; it can be intrinsic motivation which is motivation done due to internal reasons such as the alignment with values or for the self-indulgent pleasure of doing something.

In most cases, people are usually motivated intrinsically to work for an inspiring leader or in instances whereby they have personal interests. Other forms of motivation are introjected motivation which is same as the intrinsic motivation because it is internalized but differs in that if it is not done, the person feels the guilt tension. Identified motivation is also a form of motivation whereby an individual knows that something needs to be done but have not yet made a decision to do anything about it (Jun, Hsieh & Reinecke, 2017).

The four professional development activities that include mentorship, educational opportunities, workshops and seminars, as well as new projects and responsibilities, will enhance Hellen’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in that she will be able to work tirelessly and smart to ensure she achieves her personal goals (Kuvaas et al. 2017). These opportunities offer extrinsic motivation to Hellen by giving her an extensive knowledge and skills that she did not possess initially hence she will have to take in whatever she gets to be able to achieve her personal goals.

They also offer her some intrinsic motivation by trying to equip her with those skills that will enable her to meet her personal goals. Hence, she undertakes the professional development activities for the particular interest of achieving her own purposes. When she manages to make her personal goals, this is both an advantage to herself, her team members as well as the entire organization, when Hellen achieves her own goals, everyone or every place where she works to gain an advantage too since her personal goals are also her work goals.

Short term

In the long term, Hellen with ensuring that she attends all the professional development activities once after every three months and after every two years, the events will keep changing to new and modern ones.

The resources required to assemble all the new projects and responsibilities include human resources to ensure that all the new projects in different parts of the country since the company has not yet shifted to the digital storage of such data there will be the need of human resource who would assemble all such projects and responsibilities. In educational opportunities, there will be a need for financial support to purchase all the required materials of teaching; there will expect a physical building where the educational opportunity will take place. In workshops and seminars, there will be the need of financial resources to purchase everything to run such seminars, and in setting up the workshops and purchasing all materials to be used, there will also be the need for human resources who will work at the workshops and at the seminars. For the mentorship activity, the resources required are human who will be the mentors of such staff members as Helen.

To access all the stated resources, it would be important that if the managers of the organization offer finances that will help keep everything in order and also offer rooms that could be used for training and as workshops. The funds will be used to pay the workers who will be working in the studios meaning that new employees will be hired to the organization. All the resources will be acquired from HESTA since it will be the organization that will benefit through the professional development program which they could use to equip their employees and staff with the right skills to increase their output.

Strategies to be used to evaluate whether each professional development activity is productive include the creation of a set of questions which will first be used to try and identify the skills that Helen possess before she undertakes the activities and immediately after undergoing the program. Also, the output of Helen in her role immediately after she undergoes the program, how she plans to achieve her personal goals will be a crucial indication of the skills she gained during the program.

As a leader, the professional, ethical, socially and culturally appropriate practices that one must follow during the industrial development process include first conducting a self-assessment from the staff member, an assessment by the leader of the staff member’s skill level to identify the technical skills, attitude, aptitudes as well as social skills, the leader is also supposed to assess the organization’s as well as the department’s needs. Finally, the leader is supposed to explore the development opportunities available and ones appropriate for the staff member.

Professional development planning is essential to business and organizations as it helps in the achievement of the business goals and objectives (Mazzotti et al. 2018). The professional development planning for Helen impacts her output to the organization and HESTA company at large. One of the internal environmental factors of the proposed professional development plan for HESTA is that the plan will impact the employee morale of most employees in HESTA. The program will equip the employees with new skills and knowledge as well as strategies of how they would improve their output to the organization hence increasing their morale to work.

When the employee morale to work is impacted in that they get motivated means that they will increase their output which in the long-run has a positive impact to the way the organization runs, its productions and increased revenues. An external environmental factor of the plan is the industry itself which may change anytime and may affect the results intended from the plan to the HESTA organization. The industry may change how it manages things and how it serves the people hence impacting their taste and preferences, this would affect the professional development plan requesting for new changes that will go hand in hand with the demands in the market.

HESTA may face several challenges resulting from the implementation of the factors discussed, and one of the main challenges the company might face is the monitoring and evaluation of the performance of those employees who undertake the activities stated on the professional development plan and be able to measure its impact to the overall performance of the entire organization. I would, therefore, recommend that the organization try to work out the whole plan with only a single department within the organization and wait up to a certain period maybe one year to see if there are changes in how the department functions and the impact it has to the organization which it did not initially have.

References

Jun, E., Hsieh, G., & Reinecke, K. (2017). Types of motivation affect study selection, attention, and dropouts in online experiments. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW), 1-15.

Kuvaas, B., Buch, R., Weibel, A., Dysvik, A., & Nerstad, C. G. (2017). Do intrinsic and extrinsic motivation relate differently to employee outcomes?. Journal of Economic Psychology, 61, 244-258.

Mazzotti, V. L., Rowe, D. A., Simonsen, M., Boaz, B., & VanAvery, C. (2018). Steps for implementing a state-level professional development plan for secondary transition. Career Development and Transition for Exceptional Individuals, 41(1), 56-62.

Rubens, A., Schoenfeld, G. A., Schaffer, B. S., & Leah, J. S. (2018). Self-awareness and leadership: Developing an individual strategic professional development plan in an MBA leadership course. The International Journal of Management Education, 16(1), 1-13.