Professional Portfolio: Benefits, Development, and Importance

Running head: PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO
PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO
Professional practice portfolio:
Description:
A professional portfolio can be described as the documentation of the professional
achievements, skills as well as different nursing experiences. As an individual proceeds during
its nursing career, it becomes vital for the individuals in keeping an accurate and up-to-date
record of their journey. Development of a professional portfolio is one of the most significant
ways for preserving the different educational, clinical and different professional
accomplishments (Smith, 2018). It provides the peers, educational faculties as well as future
employers with comprehensive views of the path that the individual has taken to reach the goal
where the individual currently is as clinical skilled nurse. Studies are of the opinion that a
professional portfolio should never be confused with that of the resume or the curriculum vitae
as it should not only contain the basic information like that of the educational institutions that the
individual had attended, the current and past nursing positions held by the individual as well as
the different other demographic and background information (Chamblee et al., 2015). On the
contrary, it should mainly comprise of the different evidences as well as the expertise that the
nursing professional had developed as the result of these experiences. The professional portfolio
should mainly be containing the summary of the education, licensure as well as employment
history with different supporting documents. This should comprise of copies of the college or
that of the graduate school transcripts, continuing education units, licenses as well as in-service
attendance. These should also comprise of awards, dates of the promotions, annual performance
appraisals, the different dates of the promotions and also the letters of recommendations from
current or previous employers and even colleagues.

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PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO
Argument: (400)
Over the years, professional portfolios have been seen to provide huge number of benefits
to the nursing professionals. A professional practice portfolio enables nurses in assembling the
different important details in their career in one place as well as the different special
achievements that have been made by the professionals over the course of the working life. It has
been found that nurses in the present generation are increasingly utilizing their professional
portfolios as a medium of maintaining the evidences of their learning as well as reflection. This
is also helping them to demonstrate that they have met their professional requirements. One of
the most important benefits is that it helps in assisting nurses in storing as well as managing their
revalidation as well as registration of the documents in one place (Peddle et al., 2016). This
system ultimately helps nursing professionals in easily updating and producing them when
required like during the times of performance reviews and even in job applications. Studies have
opined that all nursing professionals are required to undertake continuous professional
development activities for effectively maintaining, updating and even improving their knowledge
as well as their practices and portfolios in such situations help in documenting these activities.
Moreover, creating as well as maintaining a portfolio can help in enabling nurses for identifying
their strengths as well as their learning requirements and thereby encourage them in developing a
learning plan for addressing the needs of the nurses (Jeffres et al., 2018).
One of the studies had argued that professional portfolios have proved to be more
significant than that of the resumes and CV in the present generation as most organization and
professional bodies try to focus more on the journeys of the nurses rather than the academic
details. This helps interviewers to be more confident about how the professional would be able to
manage and handle his job from the experiences they had gone through and the achievements

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PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO
made rather than focusing how she had been committed to her studies during her academic years.
Another study had supported the use of portfolios by nurses. It had stated that when nurses
prepare to go through the revalidation procedure, they would have easy access towards all
evidences that they would need and this would help in meeting all the requirements (Birks et al.,
2016). One of the qualitative studies has shown how the nurse participant had compared
preparing a portfolio with someone who run their business and requires compiling their annual
tax return and thereby needs to have all the details in hand. In the same way, maintaining the
portfolio would help in ensuring that revalidation is simple as well as straightforward step.
Portfolios also help in proper identification of the gaps in the evidences before the
revalidation date. This also helps students in being ensured that plenty of time is present with
them in attending extra courses, gathering different types of practice related feedback, preparing
a reflective account and holding the reflective discussion with a manager or that of the colleague.
However, preparation of portfolios are quite time consuming and might take up a lot of time in
jotting things down in a systematic manner and this can act as one of the challenges that
portfolios might results (Cope et al., 2018).
Management and leadership:
Development of strong leadership and management skills are excessively important for
every nursing professionals who aspire to achieve big in life. The nurse manager might need to
manage a unit, division or even a service line and their role is ensuring that everything functions
like a well-oiled machine. The nurse manager needs to be involved in different myriad daily task
as well as activities that remain related in patient care planning as well as quality improvement
and goal setting and budgeting. They are also assigned to oversee different staff schedules as