Self Managed Learning, Definition and Discussion

Introduction: Before completing this assignment, the main objective of this assignment will be to enable a chance for to assess and develop a range of professional and personal skills in order to promote future personal and career development. We will have to ensure also that it will develop ability to organize, manage and practice a range of approaches to improve performance as self-directed learners in preparation for work or future career development.

To complete this assignment, at first we have to understand how self-managed learning can enhance lifelong development. Then we have to take responsibility for own personal and professional development. Next we have to implement and continually review own personal and professional development plan. Finally we have to demonstrate acquired interpersonal and transferable skills.

Self-managed learning is a way in which individuals can manage their own learning. This means organizations can have self-managed learning programmers that fit within their structure and ensure staff is developing in a certain direction; or individuals can take responsibility for decisions about what and how they learn, and when and where they learn. Self-managed learning programs can be designed and developed, allowing individuals to lead and manage themselves through learning, so that can continue to extend their repertoire of capabilities without the need to necessarily be reliant on another human resource to teach or manage their learning. It is a form of development where we take the initiative in learning new skills, knowledge and attitudes with the support of the organization. Five question to start the self-managed learning:

• Where have I come from – what are our past experiences?
• Where I am now – what strength and weakness do I have? What is the current situation that I am in?
• Where do I want to get to – what goals/targets/objectives do I want to set for ourself?
• How will I get there – what programmed of study should I design to achieve our goals?
• How will I know if I have arrived – what criteria can I apply to assess our learning

Clear goal setting – an overview

Step 1: get the big picture. It will be a statement outlining idealized description of your life’s outcome that will inspire you and create your target

Step 2: brainstorm your thoughts to come up with a wish-list for each of your relevant life aspects, career, family and friends

Step 3: set achievable goals, even if that means taking a larger goal or dream and breaking it down into bite-size chunks. A personal SWOT analysis is a great way to work it out

• Strength
• Weakness
• Opportunities
• Threat

Step 4: Prioritize – goal setting is a skill, how to set goals takes time and practice to become proficient. Once you achieve the easy, single goals, you’ll feel motivated to try the process on some harder goals and confident in applying the process.

Step 5: when you have a set of personal goals that are meaningful and will help you achieve your “big – picture”, all you need to do is develop your chosen goals and make sure they are SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time – bounce

SEMINARS AND CONFERENCES

A wealth of knowledge usually, presented by many speakers at one time in one place A lot of “learning” at one clip, with most material compressed into two or three days’ worth of time. Seminars and conferences gives people the opportunity to present their knowledge about something to other people who end up learning new things. Seminars and conferences helps people becoming confident in speaking in the public and develops presentation skills which are needed in the organization

Internet

A Personal Learning Environment is comprised of all the different Internet tools we can use for learning. Social software is increasingly being used in education and training through such applications as web logs, wikis, tools and applications for creating and sharing multimedia and tools for sharing all kinds of different personal knowledge bases including bookmarks and book collections. Examples of the software you can use for your personal learning environment include a word processor, an e-mail client for communication, a Web browser, making multimedia presentations, a content management system for creating websites, a photo editing program and sharing service.

Task P2 Propose ways in which your lifelong learning in personal and Professional contexts could be encouraged.

Kolb’s four stage learning cycle shows how experience is translated through reflection into concepts, which in turn are used as guides for active experimentation and the choice of new experiences

Concrete experience, either planned or accidental and where the leaner actively experiences an activity, is followed by

Reflection, when the learner consciously reflect back on that experience

Abstract conceptualization is where the learner attempts to conceptualize a theory or model of what is observed.

Active experimentation is where the learner is trying to plan how to test a model or theory or plan for a forthcoming experience

Proposed the ways in lifelong learning in personal and professional

Set aside each day for yourself a little time to learn. Learning and doing homework, reading books should have benefited our life. Learning every day is the most basic method to improve our self forever.

We should also do the daily schedule for ourselves. Every day have a lot of work to do, if not order them again, I will miss our work. Moreover, when there is a logical schedule, it will help our daily life became more reasonable.

Participate in group activities; the forum is also developing a form of lifelong learning. In the group the

Knowledge that I read, learned will be brought to share with everyone, so, knowledge that I know will be known by others. When all participants share the feeling, comment me, I will have deeply sight on what they share, therefore our knowledge’ll become richer.

I need to participate in the long course and short term, be useful for future careers, such as courses to communicate with customers, soft skills, continuously improving English. After learning these things, I will apply their knowledge to practical work, which draws from the experiences themselves. Then I will use our knowledge to share and exchange with people in the same profession as me.

Task P3 Evaluate the benefits of your self-managed learning to the individual and organization.

Organization try to make sure their objectives are met and such objectives need to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound), this is by evaluating the qualities and expectations they need from the staff to those whom they have contracted with in achieving such objectives. They need staffs that have potential skills such as leadership skills, time management, and team player. Writing and communication skills, ambitious etc, such skills could be linked with objectives of the organization.

The first benefit of lifelong learning is helping us to adapt to change. A lifelong learner will keep up with society by staying current and aware of changes in such areas as technology, news and political trends or finance and money issues. We adapt and grow and seem to thrive on staying up on the latest technology. Lifelong learners look for opportunities to embrace the new technologies.

The hugest benefit of lifelong learning is the enriching and fulfilling life it provides for us. To people for whom continuing education, they can look forward to active and meaningful lives. We all have subjects in which we are interested in. A lifelong learner uses opportunities to explore these topics which they find compelling. The end result can be less stress on the body, in the home, or marriage.

Task M1 What can be the development opportunities to meet current and future needs for both personal and professional

Current needs pursuing qualification higher national diploma in business our target is completing all the assignment by end of June so that our results or transcript could be used by the university to enroll us for the final year top up degree in BA Honors in business. And to score a good brand in ilets which will help us visa process and improvement of English skills.

Future needs Opportunities are the chances that a person may have developing themselves further in another level of understanding and professional. Opportunity we have personally is continuing with further education that is joining university for the third year degree top up in Business. After that am planning to specialize in HR management, after our degree I will have various training in HR management as our future needs for both personal and professional. We also have the opportunity for doing our Masters in HR management.

Task M2 Suggest personal and professional development plan for the learners.

Everyone should develop personal and professional development plan to find out what are the required skill is necessary for the long term development in life. Education is the initial stage of our life to acquire knowledge and skill and professional life is stage where we can implement those knowledge and skill, Professional life is also help us to enhance our existing skill and knowledge. One should develop the personal and professional development plant at the early stage before the person leave the academic sectors.

For example currently we are doing BA Honors and we want to be a human resource manager in our long term career plan. We will describe future career plan and we will also describe why we choose this career. We will describe what the skills currently we possess. We will use modern tools and techniques, to analyze our skills, values, interest and knowledge. We will also find out the gaps and develop the action plan for further development on that sector. This will show us a clear path for our future career progression in professional life.

Career Selection

Currently we are business administration students and we like be in HR management in future.HR is one of the most important roles in a company. HR manager is a very important role because he/she deals with human resource which is one of the most intangible valuable assets for the company. Organization success completely depends on the employee performance and human resource manager play an important to enhance those performances. One of the important roles of HR manager is to develop the organizational structure on which organization run successfully.

There are several reasons why we choose HR manager as our career and they are described below:

Each of the organization has employee and to manage the employee organization need a department named as HR department. All over the world each of the organization has its own HR department, so there is ample of job opportunities around the globe. This will ensure us a secure job for a smooth transition in our career.

HR management role is very challenging job and much passionate about to take very challenging job role.

HR manager play a significant role for development of organizational policy that is one of the integral part for organization to run very smooth way.

Short term and Long term plan

Short term career planning means to develop a career plan for less than 5 years. Short Term Plan: In the short term development plan we will start with the self-evaluation process. We will evaluate our personality skills by self-evaluation process. In the self-evaluation process we will conduct self-analysis where we will find what our interest, values, skill and personality is. One the other side we will conduct an occupational analysis. In this process we will try to find out what qualification is required and what id the occupational trend in the industry. In this stage we also select our goals what we want to achieve in the short term and long term.

Long Term Plan:

Long term usually refer to career plan more than 5 years. we want to practice our career as a HR manager next five years once we are promoted as a HR manager. After that we want to be an HR head or director. In this time period we want to conceptualized all the HR skills and learn all the tools and techniques during our work tenure. Our long term plan is to learn all the industry HR management skill, tools and techniques. Different industry has different organizational structure, recruitment, training process, appraisal system, policy development techniques and some other HR factors.

Skill Required for Our Career: We want to be a successful HR manager, critically evaluate the job roles and responsibilities. After analyzing job responsibility and job specification, we found that following are the skills required for our further career development.

• Handle and manage difficult employee.
• Develop and consistent positive attitude
• Good verbal and communicational skill
• Efficient conflict of interest management skill
• Good negotiation skill and negotiate with more confidence
• Effective learning and listening skill
• Develop and conduct performance appraisal
• Good supervision skill
• Good knowledge about HR policy
• Efficient and effective implementation skill
• Complete understand about the HR rule and laws

Our Self-Evaluation

In the self-evaluation process one can easily find out what the skills the individuals have and what are the skills the individual need to acquire more. For self-assessment we use SWOT analysis tools and techniques that are described below.

Strength: our main strength is to handle difficult people. We believe that we can effectively supervise the difficult people as a HR manager. We have the positive attitude for any difficult work to be handled more effectively. We can solve critical problem more effectively. We have strong communication skill both written and verbally. We can also handle the conflict management more effectively. We have also good negation skill that one HR manager should have during the salary selection. We are very good at work periodization, that means how to evaluate each of the jobs effectively and which work need to be perform first.

Weakness: we have few weaknesses also. We need to develop our presentation skill that is required for employee training process. We have less customer service skill and we are not too much friendly with people. Again our selling skill is not that much effective. We can handle too much stress but we need to develop this skill because in HR management lot of work stress one has to take. We have very little knowledge in conducting performance appraisal. We need to know how the performance appraisal is conducted. We are very poor in networking development with people.

Opportunities: There are lots of opportunities in HR sector. Each of the organization has HR department. So there are lots of job opportunities all over the world. So that is our biggest opportunity to select the career in HR department. we will graduate in business administration and we have some knowledge and skill from our university and with the initial amount of knowledge and skill in HR we can easily apply for jobs in initial entry level jobs.

Threats: HR career is one of the most tentative careers for student, who is studying in business administration. HR job has a huge demand all over the world. So this our biggest treat. As there is lot of talented people in market this job sector is quite competitive. We need to acquire all HR skills and need to become more competitive in this regard.

Continuous Profession Development Plan (CPD) Continuous professional development plan is the process and techniques that enables us to continuously develop our skills and knowledge. CPD helps individual to develop credibility and confidence. CPS also help to develop the own self-appraisal system. CPD also fix out any gaps in the career goal setting objectives. CPD makes individual more productive and efficient.

Personality: Personality is the combination of emotion, behavior and attitude. We very honest person and hard working person. If any work is assigned to us, we feel that this is our own task and perform the task accordingly. We never tell lie, which is one of the biggest strong point in our personality. we like to work under pressure and also like to influence and motivate other people to work in more efficient and effective way.

Interest: we are very much interested to work in environment where we can express our own skill and knowledge. We do not like other to monitor us too much. So we are a self-driven person and very much interested to read books, article and magazine to acquire more knowledge and skills. We are very much interested to help others and work with others. We are interested to work in a secure environment.

Values: our main values are not to harm people, rather help people in their difficult time. We believe that honestly is the best policy and never tell lie to others. We are very flexible personalities, so we do not belief the hard and fast rule of anything. We are honest, and reliable.

Skills: We a very good team worker and we can motivate to work more effective way. Our decision making process is very prompt and effective and understand any problem very effectively and develop the solution of the plan more effectively. In the critical time we can work alone and control our stress. We are very creative to provide any particular solution. We have very good communication skills in both orally and verbally.

Action Plan we need to take certain action plan to remove all the gaps that are discovered from the self-assessment tools and techniques. we need to improve the public contact development skills that means the networking skills, we need to meet with more professional people and need to start using the all the social networking method such as LinkedIn, facebook, twitter and other internet social networking medium. We need to start reading more books and scholarly article during the problem solving situation. We need some other contact sources for more creative and effective solution. We need to contact with superior problem for better solution development. We need to be more self-confident and need to accept supervision and need understand the factor that the mentors are more experienced than us.

Task D1 Recommendations for the learners in order to develop their learning skills

Personal and professional development is very important for the individual to be successful in the long run. It is the process through which person can make the self-assessment and find out the gaps they have currently in the skills and knowledge. It also help individual to develop long term and short term plan. PPD is the process that help individual to set up the aim in life in the career. This is very important as the individual can act according to attain the career goals and objectives. The recommendations for the learners are that if they want to choose HR field in future should think the following aspects for their career development.

They need to develop certain skills and knowledge that are necessary for long term development of their career. They should have certain basic skills such as communication skills, decision making skill, leadership skill, prioritizing skill, motivational skill, valuing other people, analysis skill, delegating skill and reporting skill. After achieving those skills, they need to make the proper plan for their future career succession plan. In the HR department one should have the skill of interpersonal skills, negotiation and diplomatic skills, work in own initiatives, work under pressure, budgeting skill, job responsibility and job specification development skills, basic knowledge of the employment rules and regulation and IT skills. In the short term personal development plan their plan will be to acquire all the skills to get entry in the industry.

In the long term they need to acquire some advanced skills and techniques, such as effective way to solve a particular HR problem, conducting interview, outstanding negotiation skill, organizational structure development skills, employee salary structure development skills, develop retail and recruitment policy and advanced budgeting skills. We are planning to acquire all the skills in the long term. They will find out the scope of their job in different industry sector in HR and will also try to find out what are the opportunities and after that they will select the best industry to apply there. In this regard they will also select the factor where they want to work in local companies or multinational companies. They will develop there our mission and vision for our long term career development progression plan. And will develop their motivation in this stage. Once they develop their mission and vision, they will start acquire basic and advanced knowledge and skills to be a successful HR manager.