A reflective essay on career aspiration and narrative Start Assignment.
Coursework 3 – Reflective essay on career development and narrative including the production of a CV/or online professional profile
The objective of this coursework is for you to critically engage with the theory and practice around career development and narratives, to draw implications for your own personal and professional development.
For this assignment, you need to undertake the following tasks:
Produce a CV or online professional profile as part of the learning activities for week 10 of the module;
Produce some creative visual material reflecting your career aspiration and values as part of the activities for seminar 5;
Reflect on what you learnt from both of these exercises in terms of developing a career narrative and your personal and professional development moving forward.
In doing this assignment, it is recommended that you build in particular on the theories and other teaching and learning material from weeks 9 to 11 and activities from seminar 5. However, you may find helpful to link your reflection to the rest of the module material discussing professional values.
The word count for this assignment is 250 words maximum excluding your reference list & appendices. When submitting your coursework, you need to include a copy of the CV or professional profile you produced as part of the learning activities for week 10 as well as a copy of the drawing or other visual material on your career aspiration that you produced as part of seminar 5 in two appendices to your assignment. It is important to note that we won’t assess the quality of your CV or the visual material that you produced per se, only your reflection on doing these & what you learnt about developing your career and building a career narrative moving forward. If you don’t submit copies of your CV produced during week 10 and the creative visual you produced for seminar 5 as part of your assignment appendices as evidence for your reflection, points will be deducted from your grade for this assignment.
Module Learning Outcomes:
In this assessment the following learning outcomes will be covered:
LO 1. Demonstrate engagement with own personal, academic and professional development activities and planning within the context of Management Education and Learning.
LO 2. Understand what reflective practice is and apply it to own personal and professional development.
LO 3. Produce at least one professional tool such as a CV, a website, or an online professional profile.
Assignment #3 – a reflective essay on career development and narrative:l opened the material for week 10 this morning. As part of the material, you will find the guidance for assignment #3 – see section 10.2.1 here. Assignment 3 consists in a short reflective essay on career development and narrative, topics that we are touching upon from weeks 9 to 11. For this last
assignment, we are asking you to think about your career aspiration and development by using the concept of narrative as a tool to reflect on these. As such, as part of the assignment, we are asking you to produce a professional profile (a CV) in week 10 and a visual
representation of your dream career as part of seminar 5; then we are asking you to reflect on what you learnt in doing these by using the academic and practical material that we prepared for you from weeks 9 to 11.I will be holding some assignment briefing sessions next week and I will advertise them later this week. For now,make sure you engage with the material for weeks 9 &10 & seminar 5.
Preparing for seminar 5: Thinking creatively about career aspirations
As mentioned, assignment #3 consists in a reflective essay on career development and narratives based on the CV that you have to produce in week 10 as part of the career session & micro-employability course on creating a professional profile and a creative visual about your career aspiration that you have to create as part of this seminar. As such, doing the activity for seminar 5 is compulsory to assignment 3.
Using creative means to think about our career development & narrative and sharing our thoughts with others about it have been shown to help us think more intuitively about what is important for us in that regards – see for example the article from Mejers and Lengelle (2012) recommended by Jo Duberley in the resource list for week 11. The purpose of this seminar will be to engage with such creative activity by asking you to produce a creative visual about your career aspiration that you will then share with others during your seminar group. You will also be able to see what others have done and what is important for them. This can be extremely helpful and insightful.
To help you with thinking about this and linking to the module material as well, I designed a series of tasks for you to follow to create your visual representations of your career aspirations. Members of the module team also kindly carried out the same exercise and we are sharing our visuals and dream careers’ thoughts in one of the videos below to help you with this. Sharing your ideas with others at the seminar should also be quite helpful for the assignment. Make sure to keep notes of what you learnt in the process for your reflective essay.
I hope you enjoy this. It is a really cool activity to do for yourself, I promise.
