Lesson 4 - Professional Development

Activity 4 :

What PD happens in your workplace?

What strategies does your organization have in place to encourage development, change and innovation?


(post by Leo)
In my workplace, professional development is happened sometimes. Staff meeting is held every month. Staff include, teachers, principal, administrative staffs will seat together to discuss problems and define some new visions for improve student learning in our college. Every new tasks or plans will be assigned to one of our staff as the leader to work on, so every staff can be the leaders and distributed leadership is always occurred in our college. Staff training is sometime occurred when the new systems is launched, so we can be familiar with what’s going on in our college.

Since our staff always receives different enquires from student and have the chance to meet them sometimes, so the college encourage us to drop down the useful information and bring up in the meeting.  It is better than just give the questionnaire for students to give comments, as most of them find it trouble and don’t willing to do so. So we can easily identify the problems that student get and define the new vision for improvement. Our aim for the professional development is to provide the best place for student learning.

Reference:Distributed Leadership.  IN WCU. From http://www.wcupa.edu/_information/afa/VPAdminFiscal/DistLead.htm


(posted by Steffani)
The school I worked in stressed professional development. The school has Professional Development Team to organize some seminars, talks and activities, and the team also manages the record of the professional development of the teachers. Class teachers meet every week to discuss the student affairs of specific grade; subject teachers meet once a month to discuss the teaching schedule and learning difficulties of the students; functional teams meet once a month as well. Whenever the teachers, or functional teams encounter any problems, they can raise the problems to the Professional Development Team. The team may give advice or find external professional groups to solve the problems of the teachers. The Professional Development Team also keeps the teachers update about current educational issues, e.g. S.E.N., talent development. Training is provided to the teachers as well. The team also suggests what courses/ seminars available for the teachers to attend.

The school required all teachers to attend the seminars provided by EDB. Each teacher should attain not less than 30 hours in a academic year to fulfill the requirement set by the school. Teachers are also needed to share what they have learnt from the seminars to other teachers.

(Posted by Angus)
Professional Development happens sometimes in the Logistics Company I work in. The HR Department organize training to different department according to their needs in different channel like training workshop, seminar. For example, HR Department held an Occupational Safety and Health Training course to warehouse and transportation department to improve the working efficiency of the operation teams. Also, some talks may held by department manager to train staffs in order to improve their skill.

To encourage the innovation and development, the company encourage staff to attend seminar organized by the Professional Organization to collect and share experience with same professional. This help company close to market and help staff to have more idea to create new and better solution to different clients.

(posted by Marisa)

The professional development did occur in the workplace(although I haven't took part in a full-time job, i'll talk about sth happened in my part-time workplace)
Once, i worked in a computer retail shopping mall.The first step to be a good sale is to be trained and have some professional course about company and it's characteristics. The HR offered some workshop to make us involve in perfect promotion and recognition of products.Also, some tests would be held to check the workers' skill.It highly motivated workers to work hard and improve themselves.

Meeting and workshop often held for professionals, it encourages them to share experiences and tacit knowledge. or to form a team to launch some innovation and advertisement to sell computer products.

(Posted by Cyrus)
Talking about professional development(PD), since there're lots of different independent positions in my organization, so we cannot just have some collective means of PD organized by the HR department. Instead, we have different PD for each position. Like me, as a writer responsible for corporate marketing and communication, I receive consultation and coaching on writing / translation skills (which encourage improvements in writing) from the editors in U.S. among request. I also have mentoring and reflective supervision on marketing execution (which point out areas of change in job duties) from the marketing manager regularly in formal appraisal or informal dialogues. On top of the bi-weekly meeting to report current project progress (which make information transfer smoother) within our team, we also organized a special workshop bi-monthly. In this special workshop, each of us need to make a presentation about our strength. For example, as a writer, I will have to prepare a topic regarding writing; and as a graphic designer, my colleague has to present something about practical arts at office. This can stimulate innovative idea initiation and exchange when preparing and responding to the workshop materials.

However, so far, the bi-weekly meeting and bi-monthly workshop are organized less frequently as planned. Obvious reason is heavy daily workload. We always skip the meeting and workshop and this makes our PD not as sound as it should be.