Professional Development

Examples of Professional Development in the following topics:

• Teachers: Employees and Instructors

  • In 2011, American teachers worked 1,097 hours in the classroom, the most for any industrialized nation measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
  • In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional qualifications or credentials from a university or college.
  • These professional qualifications may include the study of pedagogy, the science of teaching.
  • Teachers, like other professionals, may have to continue their education after they qualify, a process known as continuing professional development.
  • In 2011, American teachers worked 1,097 hours in the classroom, the most for any industrialized nation measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

• Career Development: Vocation and Identity

  • In common parlance, a vocation refers to one's professional line of work or career, such as being a doctor.

• Women in the Labor Force

  • Women in the workforce earning wages or a salary are part of a modern phenomenon, one that developed at the same time as the growth of paid employment for men; yet women have been challenged by inequality in the workforce.
  • Economic dependency upon men has had the same impact, particularly as occupations have become professionalized over the 19th and 20th centuries.
  • As gender roles have followed the formation of agricultural and then industrial societies, newly developed professions and fields of occupation have been frequently inflected by gender.
  • A number of occupations became "professionalized" through the 19th and 20th centuries, gaining regulatory bodies, and passing laws or regulations requiring particular higher educational requirements.
  • As women's access to higher education was often limited, this effectively restricted women's participation in these professionalizing occupations.

• Gender Roles in the U.S.

  • Much scholarly work on gender roles addresses the debate over the environmental or biological causes for the development of gender roles.
  • In 1955, sociologist Talcott Parsons developed a model of nuclear families in the United States that addressed gender roles.
  • Parsons developed two models of gender roles within the nuclear family.
  • Outside the educational milieu, women and men would both perceive career to be important, and equal professional opportunities for men and women would be considered socially necessary.
  • The national trend toward a total integration of gender roles is reflected in women's education, professional achievement, and family income contributions.

• Social Mobility

  • In the United States, the trope of the American Dream holds that individuals who work hard and demonstrate intelligence will be professionally successful and attain high social status.
  • An example of absolute social movement is when a region's economic development provides quality education to a social group that previously did not have access to education, thus raising the group's literacy level and socioeconomic status.
  • Human capital refers to such individual traits as competence and work ethic, which may enable increased educational or professional attainment.
  • Social capital includes the advantages conferred by one's social network, such as access to professional opportunities and insider knowledge.
  • This graph shows the results of a study on how much intergenerational social mobility there is in a sample of developed countries.

• Norms and Sanctions

  • While it is usually social convention to show up in some manner of (usually professional) dress to a job interview, this is most likely not the case for someone interviewing to be a nude model.
  • We say that the norm that governs wearing professional rather than casual attire to a job interview is a folkway because its violation results in lesser degree of social sanction—the development of a preference rather than stigmatization.

• Child Abuse

  • Different jurisdictions have developed their own definitions of what constitutes child abuse for the purposes of removing a child from his/her family and/or prosecuting a criminal charge.
  • Cultural norms about what constitutes abuse vary widely among professionals as well as the wider public.
  • Some professionals claim that cultural norms that sanction physical punishment are one of the causes of child abuse, and have undertaken campaigns to redefine such norms.

• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

  • In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), Ferdinand Tönnies set out to develop concepts that could be used as analytic tools for understanding why and how the social world is organized.
  • The specialization of professional roles holds them together, and often formal authority is necessary to maintain structures.
  • In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), Ferdinand Tönnies set out to develop the concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that could be used as analytic tools for understanding why and how the social world is organized.

• Social Mobility

  • These programs aim to increase educational and professional opportunities for underrepresented minorities in order to decrease inequality between gender and race groups.
  • Human capital refers to such individual traits as competence and work ethic, which may enable increased educational or professional attainment.
  • Social capital includes the advantages conferred by one's social network, such as access to professional opportunities and insider knowledge.
  • The four developed countries with the the highest social mobility are Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada, with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children.
  • This graph shows the results of a study on how much intergenerational social mobility there is in a sample of developed countries.

• The Cross-Cultural Perspective

  • Through policies such as parental leave, European states actively work to promote equality between genders in childrearing and professional lives.
  • A 2010 study by the United Nations Development Programme found that 62% of Chileans are opposed to full gender equality and expressed the belief that women should limit themselves to the roles of mother and wife.
  • Legally, few barriers to women's equal participation in social and professional life remain in Japan.
  • Better educational prospects are improving women's professional prospects.