Professional Development

This report explores the concept of professional development and its significance in enhancing academic and professional skills. It includes a summary of an article on employability skills of higher education graduates, discusses the use of SWOT analysis to identify strengths and development areas, and provides guidance on creating a personal development plan. The article emphasizes the importance of higher education institutions in preparing graduates for the competitive job market and highlights the skills demanded by employers.

Professional Development

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Summary of Article................................................................................................................3
Identification of strengths and development areas by using SWOT......................................5
Personal Development Plan to enhance own learning...........................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
Professional development refers to the learning that helps an individual or a person to
earn professional credentials like academic degrees to informal learning opportunities, formal
coursework and attending conferences situated in practice (Petrie and et.al., 2017). This report is
based on academic and professional skills that an individual learns during his or her academic
coursework. This academic portfolio includes summary of the provided article and determine the
strengths and development areas by using SWOT analysis. At last, a personal development plan
is prepare to improve the weak areas identified in SWOT analysis.
MAIN BODY
Summary of Article
The article is about employability skills of higher education (HE) graduates. It depicts the
significance of higher education in current labour market. HE has given rise to various
employability skills that provides benefits to the graduates in their future career growth. Higher
education institutions plays crucial role in preparing the graduates for the competitive a world of
work. Universities are pressured to mitigate the employability standards (Sun, Jin and Tan,
2018). These ought to play determinant role in society and highly contributes to job creation and
sustainable growth in Europe. So, it is very necessary for higher education institutions to be
aware of the economic needs and adjust their programmes or activities in such a manner that they
ensure greater compatibility.
In higher education reform, a prominent position has acquired by the concept of
competence in an attempt to enhance integration of graduates into labour market. As per the
research within French economies of conventions traditions, competence is defines as a result
of evaluation or is an outcome of judgement. Two main ingredients are involved in competence
model, that includes a catalogue of skills and their consequent evaluation. The judgement
transforms the skills and knowledge into competence. As per the author, the skills that are
acquired by an individual during his / her education system are not self evident. In human capital
model, useful skills are imparted by education that maximize the productivity of employees and
subsequently entails high wages. Employment skills are very necessary for the graduates as
these makes them more employable. As per the article, it is assumed that employability is

transform into employment by employers, so their needs depicts the useful information source
on employability skills.
In the employment market, the demand of graduate skills are increasing continuously.
Higher educational institutions and universities are now started to focusing on developing the
skills within graduates that foster employability. There are various skills like interpersonal,
communication and teamwork that are specifically required by the employers. Apart from this,
there are distinct conceptual frameworks that define those skills (Wu and et.al., 2016). The
article defines about variety of hard and soft skills including relational skills, transferable and
core skills etc. The skills needed by employers are synthesized in 5 broad clusters in the article.
The first one is foundation skills which includes problem solving, oral and written
communication and critical analysis. The another one includes adaptive capacity that is
associated with the ability to adapt to foreign workplace and new circumstances, develop new
ideas or concepts and innovate, learn with autonomy.
The third is interpersonal and team working skills, Domain and technical specific skills
including information technology skills is the fourth cluster and employability skills is the last
one that is related to be flexible and adaptable, cope up with stress and pressure and meet
deadlines. All these skills are highly demanded by employers, but they are dissatisfied with
capabilities of graduates in team working and are satisfied with information technology skills of
graduates. From the analysis, it has been analysed that variety of skills are required by graduates
in current labour market. In hiring process, employers prefers some skills that must be possess by
graduates like problem solving, learning, written and verbal communication (Lejeune, Beausaert
and Raemdonck, 2018). In job advertisement, management skills are required by employers
including interpersonal skills like team working, communication, organisation, information
technology etc.
As per the article, there is no appropriate way to examine skills sets of graduates that
makes them more employable. The perception of employers plays crucial role in defining the
needed skills for graduates. This article depicts clear signs of uncertainness and indeed, less
agreement. Wide agreements found for relational skills only including communication,
interpersonal and teamwork skills and the reason is that these can be ascertained directly.
However, ability to determine and select information and analytical skills are also important in
order to facilitate interaction and communication, but these are difficult to ascertain. Employers

often use education to distinguish between more capable and less capable applicants and utilize
third party certification to find out whether the job seeker is appropriate for job position or not
without incurring costs.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Bolden, R., 2016. Leadership, management and organisational development. In Gower handbook
of leadership and management development. (pp. 143-158). Routledge.
Cullingford, C., 2017. 13 Institutional Development and Professional Needs: Some
Reflections. Professional development and institutional needs. p.223.
Cunningham, I. and Bennett, B., 2017. Self Managed Learning and qualification programmes.
In Self Managed Learning in Action. (pp. 127-148). Routledge.
Hildebrand, J., 2018. Bridging the gap: A training module in personal and professional
development. Routledge.
Lejeune, C., Beausaert, S. and Raemdonck, I., 2018. The impact on employees’ job performance
of exercising self-directed learning within personal development plan practice. The
International Journal of Human Resource Management. pp.1-27.
Tasker, F., 2015. How to prepare a personal development plan. BMJ: British Medical
Journal. 351. p.h4603.
Wu, W. and et.al., 2016. Including stakeholder input in formulating and solving real-world
optimisation problems: Generic framework and case study. Environmental Modelling &
Software. 79. pp.197-213.
Sun, C., Jin, Y. and Tan, Y., 2018, July. Semi-supervised learning assisted particle swarm
optimization of computationally expensive problems. In Proceedings of the Genetic and
Evolutionary Computation Conference (pp. 45-52). ACM.
Petrie, K. A. and et.al., 2017. Providing experiential business and management training for
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