INTRODUCTION
Career development has become of more importance in recent years as organisations utilise the investment of human resource development to an advantage (McCarthy & Garavan, 1999). Career or professional development for the purposes of this report can be defined as an attempt to help the individual analyse their abilities and interests to guide their placement, progression, and development through various assessment activities (Gunnigle & Flood, 1990, p. 172). Literature suggests that the effectiveness of several management and professional development activities can be enhanced by paying attention to managerial self-awareness and variables related to self-awareness like ...view middle of the document...
And finally, from the SWOT analysis a specific understanding of the skill areas chosen for development will be discussed followed by the discussion of the development of the ePortfolio.
THE PERSONAL ASSESSMENT OF MANAGEMENT SKILLS (PAMS) INSTRUMENT
The Personal Assessment of Management Skills (PAMS) instrument is a survey designed to provide feedback on the individual’s level of competence in management skills in order to improve on his or her competencies, see Appendix A. The PAMS questionnaire is intended to be filled out by the individual and at least 3 work colleagues or associates close to the individual being evaluated. The associates are to gauge what they perceive the individual’s personality to be from the behaviours that they have observed of the individual in question (Carlopio & Andrewartha, 2008). The model is based on research and while literature supports this research into the generic models of managerial competencies that formulated the PAMS model, some criticisms have to be acknowledged.
Literature has shown the abundance of theories formulated by psychologists of their perspective on personality and the psychological and behavioural components that shape an individual. Albert Bandura claimed that behaviour is learned, to create an action or behavior the mind constructs one’s reality from the personal and environmental stimuli (McCormack Brown, 1999). Another behavior theorist, B.F. Skinner found that personality is based on operant conditioning. Skinner argued that life is a process of “operating” in the environment, “reinforcers” from the environment drive the individual to continue the behavior being reinforced, in other words, behavior is determined by the presence of stimuli that will provide consequences to the individual (Boeree, 2006).
The PAMS instrument should consider the different factors related to an individual as the literature suggests. Because PAMS is based on the perceptions of the individual, scoring the individual (between strongly agree and strongly disagree) on what the associate perceives may provide skewed, inaccurate or misinterpreted results. Malingering can be an issue with this type of test, the respondent may choose to score the individual with haste or with a lack of integrity consequently providing inaccurate results. Implementation of the PAMS instrument needs to first determine whether the intended use is for personal/professional development or as a performance evaluation. According to Carlson (1998), raters are less fearful and more likely to provide an honest approach to the feedback if they are aware that the results will be used for personal/professional development purposes. Rogers, Rogers, and Metlay (2002) found that 360-degree feedback processes, which are similar to the PAMS instrument in that feedback is generated by peers, often failed in organisations which used 360-feedback for purposes other than personal or professional development.
PAMS RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
The...