Complete the following activities:
1. Develop a professional development plan
Consider your career aspirations. You are completing this unit for a reason. What is that?
You may have a specific, short term goal, or it may be a general direction that you want your career to go in, but the fact that you are participating in this assessment means that you have plans for yourself.
Write at one or two paragraphs on your own career plan as you see it today. It doesn’t matter if you have a dream, or if you have an established plan. Write it down.
Use the Professional Development Plan Template provided to you to guide your work.
Identify the career that interests you, and research the skills and experience that are needed for this career.
For example, the following link provides information about a wide range of careers:
https://www.open.edu.au/careers
Use the knowledge and skills needed for this career that you found in your research as benchmarks against which you can assess your personal knowledge and skills. Use the gaps between the benchmarks and your current assessment to determine your development needs and priorities. These may be shaped by your performance and feedback at the meeting in assessment task 2.
Identify your personal and professional goals for the next 12 months and the next 5 years and explain these.
List three professional development priorities based on areas for improvements and/or gaps that you have identified. For each of the priorities, provide the reason/s why you have identified this as a priority, and by when you would like to address the priority.
Use the internet to research a wide range of professional development options. The website above details a range of courses that are relevant to the career, but look at smaller courses, symposiums, local networking opportunities, and online courses.
List and summarise six professional development activities that you feel would meet your desired areas for improvement or gaps and that you could participate in over the next 12 months. For each of the professional development activities, complete all sections of the table in the professional development plan template.
Bear in mind that when you complete your plan, two of the opportunities that you identify must be a professional development opportunity that you participate in and report on as part of this assessment task. This professional development opportunities can be as simple as watching a YouTube video in relation to an industry trend or participating in a free webinar.
Save this document as Professional Development Plan.
2. Undertake two professional development opportunities.
Your assessor will respond to your email by recommending two of the free development opportunities you listed in your report.
If you do not wish to undertake these, consult with your assessor to choose two that are interesting and relevant for you.
Undertake these and use the Professional Development Report Template to record your experiences.
Save this document as Professional Development Report.
3. Write a work performance report
Assume that your company policy states that you must report to management weekly on your achievement of tasks for the week.
Review the document Work Plan Comments regarding the completion of your activities, and then develop a short report (two or three paragraphs long) with an assessment of your achievement of these tasks against requirements.
Where you have identified any tasks have not been met, identify and describe at least three actions that you will take to ensure that you meet requirements. Note that, as you are a new employee, you may be unsure of some of the procedures. You should take this into account in identifying actions that you could take to ensure you achieve task requirements.
Create a new Word document for this activity and save it as Work Performance Report.
You have not been meeting timelines at work and a number of orders to customers have been delayed. Several customers have called to complain.
Your company policy states that you must report to management all customer complaints, as well as issues relating to achievement of job responsibilities and concerns about stress and personal well-being.
You have not been able to complete all of the orders, as there have been too many for you to send out due to a sudden increase in customer demand.
You have been advised in the past that there is no budget to employ additional staff.
You are concerned about your difficulty in sleeping and general feeling of depression.
4. Write a work variations report
Company policy states that variations to workload that affect staff’s ability to work effectively must be reported to line managers.
Write a short report, about three paragraphs long, for your Manager.
Your report should describe the changes that have occurred to the work that you do, and how this is affecting you, both at work and in your free time.
Create a new Word document for this report. Save it as Work Variations Report.