Action Plan For Personal and Professional Development

Action Plan For Personal and Professional Development

As part of the natural progression of the course, it was required to complete a series of exercises in order to determine my personal strengths and deficiencies as they related to both my academic capabilities and my capabilities as a professional photographer. This sort of self-assessment was not alien to me as it was very similar to many of the methods of various courses and coaching I received whilst setting up my business a year and a half ago.

The first of these tasks was a series of computer-based exercises to acquire a visual representation of some of my strengths and weaknesses. This revealed, to an extent, much of what I was already aware.

My strengths included:

-         Guiding My Own Learning

-         Use of ICT

-         Writing and Analysis

-         Assertiveness

Whilst my weaknesses, as expected, included:

-         Time Management

-         Coping With Stress

There were also a few items of interest that fell into more of a grey area where I have “some of the required skills, but could still improve on”. These included:

-         Presenting Your Ideas

-         Research and Information Processing

Though not covered in these exercises, it is important for my own development and the resulting action plan to follow that I mention my awareness of the fact that my organisational skills are dire at best.

Having done these exercises, the next task was to evaluate my preferred “learning style”. An ideal result of this questionnaire would be an equal amount of answers directing towards each of the four learning styles: Activist, Pragmatist, Theorist and Reflector. Though I had never done anything of this sort before, I was fairly unsurprised to find that my learning style leaned heavily towards activist and reflector with a middle range value towards pragmatism and almost no emphasis on theorist.

Essentially, this means I am much more likely to jump into a task and ponder the outcome afterwards without trying to understand specifics or formulate a well thought out plan. Seeing this result on paper, I instantly recognised these traits in my day-to-day life and see how these “strengths” work for me on a daily basis.

However, acknowledging the obvious deficiency in the pragmatic and theoretic learning styles can help to understand my dilemma with time management and organisation even though I have been aware for years.

Subconsciously forgoing proper planning in favour of blind “activism” has clearly left me with no clear approach to the way I deal with tasks or my surrounding environment. Therefore, it is clear I must make a conscious effort in the future to apply these learning styles forcibly and make a real effort to overcome my weaknesses in this area.

To help with this, I have procured several generic time management sheets and “to do” list sheets as used by my local council. By filling these in at the beginning of any given week, my time should be sufficiently allotted to conquer anything I might be required to do. Furthermore, by ensuring that I give appropriate time to organise all of my goings on and assets on a regular basis, I should be able to significantly improve my organisational skills in no time. To supplement this, online resources such as “Lifehacker” and “Zen Habits” will provide to be regular sources of information on both of these main weaknesses and I will strive to apply techniques from theses sources and others in my daily routine to fix my problem areas.

Regarding “Professional Development” specifically, I am well aware that I have been on a plateau with my capabilities for a while. To combat this and further my technical and creative competencies, I will endeavour to ensure that I attempt to learn at least one new camera or lighting technique and one new retouching technique per week. This, as a bare minimum, should provide me to constantly “infuse” my work with a breath of fresh air and help me to further vary my portfolio in the interest of various types of prospective clients.