Learning Skills for Personal & Professional Development Essay

Learning Skills for Personal & Professional Development - Essay Example The main skills that I have figured out, which I have managed to acquire through my beginning of this nursing career have been: Time management- this is because I was initially poor at managing time and when it comes to planning for my assignments, something always came up which distracted me in the course and made me fail to meet the required deadlines. I realized that my research skills were highly affected since I could not research well and I was always up and down in the last minute rush to do my research and complete the necessary tasks (Ward, 2001, pp. 47-53) Internet skills for nurses. Nursing Standard 15 (21): 47-53. There are other areas that suffered seriously such as the quality of my work that I submitted after I rushed it up having poorly managed my time. This usually led to me getting poor grades. Managing time to ensure efficiency and effectiveness was my main problem; Correct use of referencing and in the process avoiding plagiarism is another learning skill that I h ave developed. This skill is well enhanced when I stick to my school’s chosen format for reference, which is Harvard style. I learned that in Harvard style, there are certain measures that should be taken once I have used someone’s work as part of my sources and thus whatever ideas that I have borrowed from any author to support my argument need to be well referenced in Harvard. This style requires that one indicates the name of the author, year of which the work was published, and then be able to note the exact page numbers that such ideas, arguments, or models have been extracted. I learned a lot about this referencing style including the format to cite various forms of sources such as documents from the websites, reports, interviews, and peer-reviewed articles, among others. With strict adherence to this Harvard style of referencing or citation, the issue of plagiarism is taken care of since I recognize somebody’s work or contribution to a given theory or mod e of thinking and avoid blatant theft of literary or intellectual property through rights violations, which is very criminal and should be shunned by all means; and finally, Numeracy skills for nursing- although I have not fully started the numeracy module for my nursing education, I am expecting to start soon as per the modules’ plan. However, I have started appreciating the importance of acquiring numerical skills in my nursing profession practice. I am therefore gearing up to tackle numeracy with full vigor once the module comes on the table. In the meantime, while I was at my place for the feeding program, I realized that it was important for James to be monitored in terms of right dosage and at what intervals. This made me appreciate the value that numerical skills would have on my nursing professional practice and personal development. This paper is written in the first person (Hamill, 1999, pp. 38-40) and will thus deal broadly with the above-identified skills that I a m in the process of refining. It will also reflect heavily on some modules such as NCFP 4004 which is the foundations for professional practice and NCFP 4005 called the problem based learning assessment. The reflective learning model that I have used is the Gibbs Reflective Cycle (Jasper, 2003, pp. 2-18), which will be well applied in the course of my discussion.