PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

Personal Development Planning

Personal Development Planning

Introduction

The career trajectories of in Mental Health will be varied. Some have specialist training, such as an attachment in psychiatry; others will have attended training programmes such as the RCGP Master Classes in Mental Health whilst others still will have acquired skills and knowledge informally over many years. These different routes into the GPwSI arena should be able to be accommodated.

The key to motivation is positive expectation. What is the point of investing in personal growth if there is no payback? Part of the problem is that we have become accustomed to perceiving the payback from learning in a very narrow way. Generations of schoolchildren have been told that academic learning is the only way to avoid dead-end jobs and careers. Yet there is clear evidence that academic achievement is a far from reliable indicator of who will succeed and who will not. Moreover thousands of graduates have discovered the hard way that a degree is not always a gateway to a high-flying career. Changing the motivation depends on altering expectations. First, I plan to redefine learning in a much broader way. One possibility is to focus on the notion of personal value: the combination of a sense of personal worth and the ability to contribute to, rather than take from, society. Implicit in the concept of personal value is the theory that success is not simply a matter of a career, but is about using our natural talents to their greatest effect.

In leading-edge companies, these tools already exist in the form of personal development plans (PDPs). Effective PDPs enable people to identify a variety of goals, some of which are work related, others that are based on broad career objectives or linked to achievements in sport, leisure or domestic life. Although at the moment PDPs are used mainly for managers and high-flyers, in principle everyone could benefit from setting personal development objectives, establishing milestones to achieving these and defining any help they need.

In particular, the education system should include personal development planning as a basic social skill, an integral part of educating the whole person. By paying as much attention to how learners develop their personal value as they currently pay to the number of GCSEs or A-levels gained, schools could be more relevant to less academic pupils. They would also create members of the workforce who possess many of the positive attitudes that employers complain are now lacking.

Main Body

In recent experiments to identify who managers learn from, I have found that few people make extensive use of their "learning net" -- the people around them from whom they can learn. For most of us, the learning net is too narrow (it often doesn't include direct reports, for example) and most opportunities for learning slip by, because of a lack of time, a failure to realise what could be learnt or inadequate motivation. Learning organisations are beginning to redefine employees' responsibilities to include helping each other to recognise, and take ...