Assessment : Professional Practice and Professions
Length: 2000-2500words
Task
You are required to choose two professional areas in which you have an interest and research those professions and their professional Body's or associations.
1. Define a profession
Many professions have organisations or professional body's or associations that provide guidelines for conduct/ ethics/ professional practice within that profession.
A lot of time, money and effort goes into creating these but how aware are the individuals working in these professions of these guidelines and do they influence their day to day actions at work?
2. Define a professional body? What do they do? How can they assist you in your career moving forward?
Examples of professional bodies' code of conduct include.
• Early childhood
• Public Relations
• Marketing research
• IML
• CPA
3. Select two professions and describe them.
For example: Look at this site for the Tax Practitioners Boards. This looks at all the recognised professional associations for Taxation professionals.
4.Choose two professional association/bodies for each of your chosen professions
Research them online. You may wish to call them up and talk to them or get some promotional material from them.
5.Compare and contrast the four professional Associations /Body's Mission, Vision, Values, codes of conduct and ethics.
6. Reflect How much emphasis do the groups you have choose place on their codes of conduct/ ethics/ behaviour?
What issues arise for the professional body and how do they police their code? How do they communicate it to their members? Are there legal ramifications if the code is breached?
Do they have to do continual education? You can if you wish contact the professional body to ask some of these questions. What influence do you believe these codes have on their member's behaviour?
What can the consequences be for Members in their career if they breach either their professional body's code or the organisations code/s?
7.Review
Which organisation would you choose to join and why?
8.Then reflect.
What this means for you in your career and what actions should you take now.
Rationale
This assessment task will assess the following learning outcome/s:
• be able to critically reflect on and evaluate the application of theory in a workplace setting.
• be able to apply knowledge of contemporary thinking in employability skills, career planning and development to enhance personal skills applicable to the work environment.
• be able to develop practical competence through personal professional experience by participating in work placement.
• be able to evaluate personal development across a range of professional practice skills.
Professional body's/organisations, Ethics and professional conduct are extremely important in the workplace and different professions have different requirements and expectations of the people within the professions.
To develop your career you will need an understanding of these for your chosen profession but you will also need to understand the requirements if you are to join a professional association.
For some professions membership of a professional association is mandatory and you will need to be working towards acquiring the experience and credibility to be able to join the professional association.
The aim of this assessment is to:
•To gain knowledge of professional body's / organisations/ associations
•To get a real world understanding of how codes of ethics/ conduct /behaviour impact individuals in their career;
•To understand the difference between a professional Body's code and expectation of their members and the member's expectations and actions; and
•To reflect on this in your career.