For physiotherapy professionals it is really important these days to keep a portfolio of all our learning and development, indeed in some countries such as the UK it is a requirement for our professional registration. In an old post on CPD that I wrote for my first CPD series I talked about the learning activities that can be regarded as part of professional development. New web technology has added a few activities to this list but also provided us with the opportunity to record our learning activities, store evidence and keep a portfolio on-line.
There are formal providers of on-line portfolios such as Pebble Pad (as provided to members of the CSP) however as I mentioned in my last post blogging is also a very effective and suitable method. WordPress or Blogger offer us an easy way to instantly set up a free blog and immediately start recording our personal learning and professional development. How do we do this? For each learning experience you should follow these steps:
- Write a summary of the learning experience details which should include a description of the actual experience, when it occurred, where it occurred, who else was involved and how many hours it took to complete.
- Record the actual learning outcome of your learning experience. These may fulfil or be slightly different to the learning objectives that you had planned in relation to your learning needs or they may be incidental following an unplanned learning experience.
- After this your reflections on your learning experience should be documented.
- You might then want to make links between your learning and research evidence to prove development of your evidence based practice. The integration of research evidence into your practice provides a more solid foundation for your practice.
- Then try to link your learning outcomes to other standards such as competency frameworks, professional standards and service targets to enable you to easily refer back to learning activities completed that will support processes such as proof of competence or professional body registration for example.
It is also possible with free and open software, such as WordPress, that is available these days to make our own websites and build our entire portfolio, CV and professional presence on-line. This is a good way of globally promoting ourselves, our work and our brand, but remember if making this public to always bear in mind the importance of being professional on-line.
If your wondering about how to go about continually professional developing have a look at my old CPD series.
