Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF) guidance

The Staff Governance Standard affirms this by requiring all staff to:

• keep themselves up to date with developments relevant to their job within the organisation
• actively participate, agree and review their Personal Development Plan (PDP) annually with their manager
• maintain and develop their skills to ensure that they can do their job safely and effectively

Core Dimension 2 is about ensuring staff continue to develop themselves using a variety of different activities and if required that they contribute to the development of other people during ongoing work activities. This might be through structured approaches like the PDPR process, mentoring, professional/clinical supervision or through less formal approaches like problem solving and job shadowing.

Think about examples related to your post:

• who will help you identify what you need to learn and agree your PDP with you?
• how and when do you review your own knowledge and skills and identify your own learning needs?
• how will you record your reflection on the learning activities to be recorded? - in a workbook, portfolio, electronic recording tool or somewhere else?

Apart from your own development do you help anyone else to develop and learn? Others may include:

• patients and carers
• colleagues in your own team or other colleagues
• trainees/students
• staff that you are responsible for supervising or managing

If there is a requirement to support others in their development, how and when might this be done?

• during induction, ongoing work and/or when changes are made to work practices
• act as a coach, a mentor, as a reviewer in the personal development process, by providing feedback, providing professional supervision, providing feedback to students/learners during work placements or assignments etc

Remember

Personal development covers a very wide range of activities. These can take place during normal ongoing work or learning and development staff undertake on their own.

Examples of personal development activities might include:

• in-service training
• shadowing - working along side another member of staff in a similar or different job
• secondments or 'acting up' in another post for a short time
• eLearning and distance learning

It does not always mean having to attend courses as the only way to develop new knowledge and skills.

It is just as important to keep existing skills up to date as well as developing new ones. You can do this by keeping up to date with:

• evidence based practice - maybe through using the resources available on Turas Learn on a regular basis
• any new IT changes to the systems used in your day to day work
• any new policies that have been introduced to the workplace - making sure you read these and note any changes that need to be made to work practices

Personal development also includes the learning you may get from helping others to develop so having students on placement or training new members of staff could be included here as an example.

Next: Core Dimension 3 - Health, Safety and Security