Course Description

This course aims to provide students with the skills necessary to begin their development as business professionals. Students develop their skills and knowledge in their chosen profession while also building a broader set of professional skills and establishing their professional identity.

Learning Outcomes

• Analyse your personal professional development using professional reflective practices.
• Explain the role of ethics in professions.
• Analyse and represent your personal professional learning ecosystem (incorporating formal and informal sources of learning.
• Reflect on the nature of their involvement in cooperative learning processes.

Learning Experience

Personal professional development is a skills-focused course designed to support students in forming a professional identity alongside their disciplinary studies. The course aims to develop reflective capability, ethical awareness, and an understanding of how professional learning occurs across formal, informal, and social contexts. It is positioned early in students’ programs to establish a professional and growth-oriented mindset that can be applied across study, work, and life.

The learning experience was designed for a fully online OUA cohort, many of whom balance study with work and caring responsibilities. This informed a deliberately scaffolded structure across 12 modules, with a visible shift in learner effort over time. Early modules focus on conceptual grounding through short readings, video, and audio, while later modules progressively prioritise applied reflection and assessment preparation. This progression was made explicit to support learner planning and self-regulation in an asynchronous environment.

A distinctive design feature was the use of inclusive personas, Sarah and Alex, to anchor abstract concepts in narrative form. These non-binary archetypes were used consistently to model professional decision making, ethical judgement, collaboration, and identity formation, allowing students to project and compare without being labelled or constrained. The personas enabled the academic to integrate authentic stories while maintaining an inclusive and non-prescriptive tone.

Self-awareness and interpersonal capability were further developed through the Johari Window model. While an interactive external Johari Window tool was identified as pedagogically valuable, licensing and access constraints prevented direct embedding. In response, the learning experience was redesigned to foreground process over platform. Clear instructions, structured reflection prompts, curated adjective lists, and guided discussion were embedded directly into the lesson, with optional links to external tools. This ensured equitable access while preserving the reflective intent of the activity.

Assessment design reinforced professional practice. For Assessment 3, students developed a digital portfolio using Microsoft Sway to document their personal and professional development journey. Students were supported through clear guidance, exemplars, and a reusable template. Using Sway shifted the task from a traditional written submission to a multimodal artefact that mirrored real-world professional portfolios, supporting digital literacy, reflective synthesis, and reuse beyond the course.

Key conceptual content, such as diversity and inclusion in the workplace, was deliberately uplifted through learning design and media collaboration. Dense policy and statistical text was transformed into visual representations using infographics and data-driven graphics, enabling students to more easily interpret patterns, compare groups, and connect evidence to professional responsibility. This approach supported accessibility, cognitive load management, and deeper engagement with complex and sensitive topics.

Optional engagement with third-party platforms such as Blinkist further modelled lifelong learning behaviours without increasing assessment load.

Overall, the learning experience integrates reflective pedagogy, inclusive experience design, and pragmatic systems thinking to support professional capability that is transferable, authentic, and sustainable beyond the subject itself.

MiroBoards:

• Description: "PPD Persona Journey" Link: "https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lpd3QN4=/"

• Description: "Iteration #2" Link: "https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ln0uMCA=/"

• Description: "Course Planning" Link: "https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l0xZjcM=/"

• Description: "Examples of iterations for persona development used in the course, course planning and mapping visualisation " Link: "https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lyIZPDA=/"