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REFLECTION AS A PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE:
Developing Strong Leadership Skills for Young Professionals
Professional reflection is an excellent way to gain a better understanding of yourself in the workplace and grow in self-awareness. These are great skills to teach our young professionals, especially as the school year winds down. It is also a great opportunity to learn more about the student's experience at your company. Reflection and self awareness are often skills that need to be taught. How can we illicit this type of practice in our students? Most often it can be done by asking meaningful and specific questions about their experiences.
Here are some questions you may want to guide your young workers through:
- What were the highlights of your work this year?
- What challenges did you face and how did you over come them?
- What new skills or knowledge did you acquire this year?
- What goals did you achieve and what goals do you have for the future?
- What feedback did you receive, and how did you use it to improve?
- What areas do you want to grow in professionally?
- What is a project or job that you feel you did really well at this year?
- Are there other skills you would like to learn or be mentored in?
The process of answering these questions, and questions like them about professional situations might help your student worker identify areas for improvement, or simply assist them in considering how they might do things differently in the future. It is also a time to think about how their talents might be of best use in the work setting. We hope we can all learn and grow from this process.
We appreciate your partnership and look forward to finishing the school year strong!
"We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience."
- John Dewey
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