Personal and Professional Development

Personal and Professional Development

Introduction

Career development has become of more importance in recent years as organisations utilise the investment of human resource development to an advantage. Career or professional development for the purposes of this report can be defined as an attempt to help the individual analyse their abilities and interests to guide their placement, progression, and development through various assessment activities. Literature suggests that the effectiveness of several management and professional development activities can be enhanced by paying attention to managerial self-awareness and variables related to self-awareness like self-efficacy. Admundson (1995), argues that the two key variables that moderate career decisions are the individual's self-awareness and self-efficacy which are essential because high levels of self-awareness and self-efficacy enables the individual to exert more control over long term effects and are in a better posistion to respond proactively to situations. Therefore, analysing managerial and professional development in regard to self-awareness creates a positive effect to both personal and professional enhancements (Stevens & Cooper, 2009).

This report posits the importance of managerial self-awareness to the effectiveness of personal and professional development. It aims to develop understanding of self awareness for career development gauged from feedback tools, specifically the Personal Assessment of Management Skills (PAMS) instrument. To identify strengths and skill areas for development and to identify long term career goals. Firstly, the report reviews the PAMS instrument against popular feedback systems like 360 degree feedback and then delves into the analysis of the results from the completed PAMS questionnaires so that to identify the discrepancies in the data that can provide inference to areas that the career SWOT analysis section of the report will justify. And finally, from the SWOT analysis a specific understanding of the skill areas chosen for development will be discussed followed by the discussion of the development of the portfolio.

The Personal Assessment of Management Skills (PAMS) Instrument

The Personal Assessment of Management Skills (PAMS) instrument is a survey designed to provide feedback on the individual's level of competence in management skills in order to improve on his or her competencies. The PAMS questionnaire is intended to be filled out by the individual and at least 3 work colleagues or associates close to the individual being evaluated. The associates are to gauge what they perceive the individual's personality to be from the behaviours that they have observed of the individual in question. The model is based on research and while literature supports this research into the generic models of managerial competencies that formulated the PAMS model, some criticisms have to be acknowledged.

Literature has shown the abundance of theories formulated by psychologists of their perspective on personality and the psychological and behavioural components that shape an individual. Albert Bandura claimed that behaviour is learned, to create an action or behavior the mind constructs one's reality from the personal and environmental stimuli (McCormack Brown, 1999). Another behavior theorist, B.F. Skinner found that personality is based on operant conditioning. Skinner argued that life is a process of “operating” in the environment, “reinforcers” ...