Professional Development

The Role of Professional Development

Professional development refers to continuing education either in you chosen field or a new totally unrelated field. It also involves the development of process skills sometimes referred to as leadership skills as well as task skills. Some examples of process skills are effectiveness skills, team functioning skills and systems thinking skills.

Professional Development encompasses the developing of skills relevant to your current occupation like leadership skills for trainee managers and specialized training in techniques or equipment relevant to theirs field for other professionals. These skills are the ones that will make for better employees for the company in the long run.  A company will never be judged for success from the top down, but rather from the bottom up.  When you have those at the bottom trained, then you begin to see results.

There are so many ways to learn, the key is knowing what is offered when and where.

Today there are many academies springing up all offering Professional development courses. Companies like MarcoPolo Professional Development have a professional development program that is designed to meets the needs of the educator for high quality development that guides the teachers through resources on the internet, provides teachers with the tools and materials necessary to use internet content for both themselves and their students, help educators work with their peers to create lesson plans, activities and research exercises and leverage a scalable training module to train the largest number of teachers and produce the greatest educational impact. Through an extensive train the trainer model which features multiple course offerings, MarcoPolo has trained over 215,000 teachers to date. Another is the Professional Development Resource Center which includes training scripts, classroom interaction examples and training support materials designed for use in your training and workshops.

OCLC.org has a professional development section which was created to extend learning to as large an audience as possible. They also have online training from U.S. regional service providers. You can learn from the comfort of your own P.C. The modules are provided through the Library Learning Partnership and Mindleaders and are a great way to stay up to date with current technology, management and other topics.

Many companies have their own in house training or use the services of trainers like those listed above. Depending on your present qualifications, what skills you need to develop you can find a training program for your field. Very often these courses are paid for by your employer or at least heavily subsidized. If you are choosing a new field or updating older skills with a view to other employment options you will be responsible for the costs. In any case the cost of education is small compared to the cost of ignorance.