The Personal Development Portfolio is designed to help you get the most value out of your placement work experience.

The goal of this information is to help you to find a first work placement and develop self-reliance skills

• To introduce you experience based learning techniques
• To develop further knowledge and understanding of the management functions and skills
• To develop team working skills

To develop knowledge and appreciation of statistical inference in business and management

The following topics will be illustrated:

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Introduction and Self-reliance Skills - Exploring self-reliance

Self-awareness; Self-promotion - Supervised Work Experience

"Curriculum Vitae <http://lisaconsulting.com/networkopportunities/>"_ - Opportunities and Networking

"Action Planning and Decision-making <http://lisaconsulting.com/actionplanning/>"_ - Cover Letters and Interview Skills

"Development Focus <http://lisaconsulting.com/devfocus/>"_ - Job Search Plan

Business Games

"Team Working <http://lisaconsulting.com/teamwork/>"_

"Organizing <http://lisaconsulting.com/organizing/>"_

Planning

Leadership

Controlling

Tasks Action Plan

• Record of Work - a summary of your work profile
• Reflective Learning - a diary about your day-to-day duties
• Developing your Skills - Self Appraisal of competencies and discussions with your colleagues or Supervisor

Presentation Outcome of your Portfolio

• Legibility - All entries should be clear and comprehensible
• Layout - Diary entries and the summary work record should be clearly laid out and orderly
• Condition - The portfolio should be intact and in good condition throughout

The Content of Your Portfolio

• Completeness- All tasks completed in a conscientious and professional way
• Relevance- Work record and diary entries relevant to learning aims
• Consistency - Logical relationship between entries in work record, diary entries, assessment profile and improvement strategies
• Integrity - Evidence of input from Industrial Supervisor

Training Record

Record details of any training you are given by your employer

This training may take the form of in-house courses or courses delivered by external consultants contracted specially for the purpose.

Please, indicate a date, course title, short description and the name and title of a person who delivered it.

Your Induction Checklist

The following items should be included in your induction into the organization, preferably on your first day.

Please check off the items below when they occur and discuss with your Industrial Supervisor any items not covered within 1 week of the start of your placement. This list is not exhaustive and other topics may be covered which you may note if you wish.

Tasks

Introduced to key staff members and their roles explained

• Location of toilet facilities
• Lunch, tea and coffee arrangements<
• Place of work
• Dress code
• Work space
• How to answer the telephone, transfer calls and make calls both internally and externally
• Post arrangements
• Car Parking

Health and Safety Issues

• Emergency Procedures
• Safety policy received or location known
• Location of First Aid box
• Fire procedures and location of fire extinguishers
• Accident reporting and location of accident book
• Display Screen Equipment regulations/procedures
• Manual handling procedures
• Protective clothing arrangements
• Instruction on equipment you will be using
• Other issues

Tasks - Record of Work and Reflective Learning

Key aspects of Supervised Work Experience are (i) the actual jobs you do in the placement and (ii) what you learn while doing the job.

The aim of this task if therefore two-fold - to provide you, for future reference, with a structured record of the job and to encourage your thinking about the work (reflection) to promote your learning.

The Job

When you record work activities on the Work Record sheets, first of all, you might want to record the activities or jobs in some detail. However, as the placement progresses you will want to use abbreviations or your own shorthand to record the jobs which are by then more familiar to you. At the end of the placement you are required to summaries the range and nature of the jobs you have done and to show approximately how much time you have spent doing each type of job.

The Learning

You are to use the Diary pages to record your observations and experiences e.g. how you felt about certain jobs or parts of jobs, whether you enjoyed doing particular jobs, were indifferent to them or hated them!

Clearly, observations and experiences are only worthwhile if you learn something from them, so be sure to identify the learning for each set of observations or experiences you decide to record in your diary.

You should enter in your diary the observations and experiences relating to the learning aims are set out below:

• to develop your personal and interpersonal skills and to improve your knowledge and understanding of the management functions;
• to develop further knowledge and understanding of the business functions and of how they are integrated within the business organization.

These diary entries are to help you reflect on particular parts of the work so that you can identify why things went right or went wrong and what actions or behaviors should be adopted in the future to achieve successful enjoyable outcomes.

Whenever you can, use your placement as a source of data and information:

Prepare a document on "Reflections on improving personal and interpersonal skills with reference to your experiences at (organization)"

Identify a business/management problem/issue within the host organization, undertake a limited investigation of it and prepare a management report which outlines the topic, the methods used to investigate the topic and a discussion of the findings.

References:

Hannagan, T (1998) Management Concepts and Practices, 1nd ed., Pitman Publishing. Turya, E (1992) Write them right:, Schelmsford, Beihireyo Books