Professional Development

“Professional Development is quite simply a means of supporting people in the workplace to understand more about the environment in which they work, the job they do and how to do it better. It is an ongoing process throughout our working lives.” –Plymouth University.

As a Journalist, you are constantly around new and exciting media and technology products, some of which you may not know how to use. As part of your job, you will  be using these products either from time to time or on a daily basis and will therefore become a lot more fluent in how to use a particular product etc. This links into something called professional development.  Professional development is a way of becoming more advanced in the job that you do by developing skills, knowledge and many other aspects of work life. A Journalist could use professional development to develop their skills on a chosen subject area for example, fashion. If a journalist was knowledgeable in modern day fashion, they could use professional development to become just as knowledgeable in historical fashion or vice versa. There are many reasons why workers and professionals want to develop their skills, some being; they could want to improve on the work that they are doing and become better at their job, they may wish to learn how to use new technology or even a whole new set of skills they could add to their work (such as another language etc) or they could wish to undertake professional development to broaden their career chances for the future. Professional Development could also help towards promotions and, in a journalistic point of view, more chances to feature on the front page of a newspaper etc.  There are many ways you can develop your professional skills such as coaching, top up lessons, mentoring and technical assistance. Things such as these are classed as skills maintenance and are available in many different ways and on many different platforms. For example, all of the ideas mentioned above to help with your professional development can be done online or in person. Websites such as skillsmaintenance.com promote top up courses which can be taken online to boost your knowledge without having to leave your home or, if you wanted help in person, there are many top up classes, coaches and mentors at many Universities, Colleges and Workplaces that would be able to help.

Daisy Williams an International Journalism graduate from Liverpool John Moores University and now a  trainee feature writer for Mercury Press said online that: “I not only refined my journalistic skills doing this degree, like writing, targeting and thinking of your audience, but also my skills on computer programmes such as In Design and in legal situations. The list is endless.”

Daisy’s quote above, shows that another option for skills maintenance could be a part time course at either a University or College as skills taught there could slightly alter from the skills that you may have.