Professional Development Through Self-Reflection and Goal Setting

Introduction

Continuing professional development (CPD) is important because it ensures that individuals are competent in the profession. It is written in the NHS guidelines that trusts must invest in skills and development for their service professionals. Which is why it is important for me to be continuously learning. It improves the quality of care by ensuring all staff have the skills they need to treat patients. It allows individuals to be informed and up to date with their relevant regulatory body. The desired outcome form CPD is that it would safeguard the public, professionals, and the setting. As it is an obligation to this it is important that reviews and reflections before going into a career is used. This allows individuals to become accustomed and improve their abilities before going into the profession. As children's nursing is complicated with different conditions and every year a review comes out about new discoveries it is imperative that I am informed so I will be acknowledging any new treatments that could potentially save more lives. Integrity increases when you take time to reflect on core values. Having a clear understanding of what values, you deem most important puts them at the forefront of your mind and strengthens your decisions. Work experience is a great way to do this as the individuals would be identifying the strengths they have and weaknesses they need to improve on. This means that in the future they will be able to provide high-quality of care and learn more effectively from their previous experiences, impacting their performances in their professions.

Reflecting on Strengths and Weaknesses

Being able to self-reflect it allows individuals to identify and analyse strengths and weaknesses. Many people already focus mainly on the positives on what they can do and what they have done well over a period of time. However, as tempting as it is the individual should also use that energy to focus on weaknesses. This allows them to reflect on where they can improve. There needs to be an objective view and the individual should try and view themselves differently and maybe from a different perspective to get the best possible self-assessment. When complete there will be clear objectives and areas where you need to improve. Steps would be made, and time scales should be used to accomplish the goal.

Multidisciplinary working is when professionals from a range of different backgrounds or disciplines work together to deliver care that meets the holistic needs of the service user. This can only be reached, and the high quality can only be provided by a range of professionals who function together for a shared goal brought together in unique team. The team would benefit both the service user and the health professional working on the team. These include improved health outcomes for the service user and the more efficient use of resources and improve job satisfaction. By self-reflecting this would allow individuals to focus on what they think they need to improve on and would be able to improve these so they can work together using their strength to provide healthcare. They will become more intuitive that professionals would modify their clinical practice and more time would be spent on the service user rather than having conflict within the team. To ensure that optimum functioning of the team and roles being upheld team members must be clearly defined and should have the information they need to improve and provide.

There are many different theories and frameworks that can be used as a part of self-assessment and reflective practice. Using the Kolb’s reflective cycle self-reflection could be improved and would support personal development. They individuals can be helped to learn more effectively by the identification of their lesser or weaknesses in any skills or task. They would then identify also the strengths of these through the application of the experiential learning cycle. Reflection is an integral part of learning and according to Kolb’s process it consists of four stages. These include experiencing, reflection and conceptualize and planning for the next time. Experience is doing something that requires different skills and by reflecting this, the individual would be able to see what they could improve on. After thinking about the experience and interpreting the individual would be able to conceptualize. This is when a general hypothesis is made about the experience and what you think would happen. When planning this means taking the concept and testing this outback into the experience. Learning from experience involved reflection and by going through the stages it would help them to improve what they need to become better in their personal and professional development.

Self-Reflection for Professional Growth

Having clearly defined goals allows individuals to work towards their goals and provides reminders and motivation from the self-reflection so they can achieve. An awareness of the personal and core values is vital to help gain clarity on the next steps. Reflection for individuals gives the brain peace of mind when surrounded by stressful environments. The individuals should analyse their goals and see what skills they need to meet these goals they have set. This should be SMART targets, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. While self-reflecting the individuals should focus on the skills, they have used on the positive stuff they have done and see how they can transfer these skills and abilities to the ones they need to improve. Self-reflection is an important tool at any stage of your career. For health and social care professionals this would benefit the overall provision of care as previous experiences will shape the way future actions are given pout. In the health and social care settings mistakes can be made which can either be detrimental to someone health or it could be used as opportunities for growth. All experiences can be learned from with this self-reflection whether it be highlighting the weaknesses or identifying new goals to set in the future to better themselves.

However, even though self-reflection is important on a regular basis many do not keep this up which could result in problems. Regularly if they are not self-reflecting this could lead them into a false conscious where they think that everything that they do is good and that if they ever do reflection many people focus mainly on the strengths as they want to seem better. The individuals would therefore not understand what they need to improve and would not act upon them as they would focus on the strength they have. If they were reflecting but not regularly, they would forget their goals and the skills they need which could lead to mistakes being made and important improvements either not being made or not being done fast enough. It is difficult being objective which means experiences and tasks done can be overlooked.

When self-reflecting the individual may not like the results gained from the self-reflection. When taking time to reflect they may be dismissive of the strengths as they know they are good at them and dislike the noted weaknesses. They therefore may become more defensive in the process that they don’t learn anything new and nothing changes, so the results are not helpful for the individuals. This would not benefit the service users that individuals were treating, in relation to the health and social care settings. This is because they would not get the high quality of care that they expect because they don’t know what they need to improve. This could lead to mistakes being made whilst treating the service users and the duty of care over the service user would not be achieved.

If reflection wasn't made there wouldn't be a way for individuals to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. This would cause problems when choosing their careers choices. This is because they don’t know what they are good at which means they won't be able to excel in their chosen field. They also would not be able to know what their career goals are because they are just staying the same without improving.

It is important that individuals self-reflect as they would be able to create goal and actions plans which will help them focus on how to achieve improvements. Once individuals and work experience students get into the habit of self-reflecting, they will be able to improve skills and abilities within he careers field.

My work experience in different settings has supported me in deciding that I would like to do children's nursing. Next year I plan to become better at my problem-solving skills and my confidence as I have identified through the self-reflection that this was something I lacked on and would want to improve for the work placements I would endeavors in the university course.

It was important for me to plan for the work experiences. Planning helps an organization chart a course for the achievement of its goals. I was able to envision results and scenarios that I would have to use different skills and abilities. Setting goals that challenge myself allowed me to strive for better and in the health and social care setting which I attended a better performance is one of the key things which needed. It is also a key aspect of the planning process which I did. I had to use these goals that were realistic and timely that would allow me to become more determined to be successful. Planning for me gave me a wakeup call as I was able to see what my weaknesses were and when actually doing the tasks, I was able to compare the preferred outcome to the actual outcome. This was important for me and my future development in my career. It increases my efficiency as it gave me insight on the resources I would use and reduced the wastage. This benefitted the actual setting as I was more aware of what resources u was using as it avoided wastage and increases the overall efficiency.

Planning and carrying out the work experience allows me to keep in good control as I was able to compare.It would have been impossible to compare and see if I had improved. I would not be in control if I were not to plan before the actual work experience. This planning helped me to achieve objectives as there was always prompts whilst I was carrying out the work experience to use the different skills to get the favoured results. Therefore, planning is necessary an whilst carrying out using the goals it helped me to get better at task and achieve better outcome and development.

I would after my experience reflect on my performance. Many theories agree that reflective practice is a skill that can be learned and honed, which is good for those individuals who haven't done it before. I was able to increase my self-awareness and develop a clear understanding of goals and others. From the reflection, I was encouraged in active engagement in increasing my skills and abilities in the work process. From this I would be able to decide what to do next for my work experiences in the future and my career. By reflecting I would be able to see different ways to overcome challenges and problem-solve to a high degree which would benefit me in a professional setting.

I was able to identify that I was extremely good in communicating with a range of different people by changing the tone, body language, and the type of language I was using. This benefitted me in the different settings as I was working with children, adults colleagues, and supervisors who all had to be spoken to differently. By planning for my work experience I was able to inform my decision in children's nursing. This is because I was active in identifying the strengths I had an I know that with the caring qualities I had that it would be more beneficial for me and for others if I were to go into a health and social care course. I chose to work with children as the majority of my work experience, I was in an environment surrounded by children. I have had feedback from others who have praised me for being good with the children and was praised for my ability to switch y communication quickly to accustom the service users and my colleagues.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I benefitted extremely from this unit of work experience. It has shown me the professional skills I need in a professional environment. It has also helped me to choose my future career and by learning the skills I was able to understand what needs to be done to succeed. I have enjoyed this unit as I was able to identify the strength that I didn’t think I had and the weaknesses which in need to improve so that I become better.