GGPET

What Goes in a PLP?

  1. It helps to have a baseline. What are you already doing? What are you good at? What are the major events in your life that have helped you to where you are now? A Personal Learning Plan, should be a Portfolio. And it helps to start by feeling good. Identify and record your strengths
  2. What does your job require of you. What sort of knowledge do you require in order to do it well. What skills have you learnt and how do you update them? Are their new skills that will enable you to do your job better? Write down your own job description
  3. How often do you lose interest in medical journals? Or find it difficult to motivate yourself to even look at one? Can you remember falling asleep in a postgrad lecture? Too often our learning lacks relevance to our daily work. Too often it is pure chance that allows us to retrieve a Pearl of Wisdom from a mire of irrelevant dross. Or conversely, we find our educational stimulation from learning even more about our pet favourite subject. Fascinating stuff perhaps for the super specialist, but useful.....? Efficient and productive learning depends on being able to Identify Learning Needs.
  4. Learning Needs are Objectives we set ourselves. They are sometimes impossibly complex. Identifying objectives and then failing to reach them erodes our self confidence and belief. We become resigned and disillusioned. We are unfulfilled and thus suffer additional stresses and risk burnout. Our Objectives should be SMART (i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Trackable) - also known as ARMPITS - Achievable, Realistic, Measurable, Positive, Important, Time-Related, Specific.
  5. Using these criteria, we should be able to identify how we are going to achieve our objectives. Whether through, Reference books, colleagues, Lectures, Workshops or whatever. But it is all too easy to "cop out". Boredom, laziness, - just being too busy - So it is important that we build into our plans some method to show we have achieved what we set out to do. we must Evaluate our learning. This reinforces what we have learnt through processes of Reflection, which helps to cement the learning process

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