5 Identifying your goals and planning your study

Research shows that professional learning is most effective when it is planned as a high-level aim and then broken down into smaller, manageable goals.

Before you undertake any professional learning, you need to plan what you will do to make sure that it meets your learning needs. Developing a clear plan will help you to manage your professional learning. This means that you need to:

• identify the skills and knowledge you need
• set your goals
• decide what you need to do to achieve these goals.

The activities in this section will guide you through these steps.

The final stages of this process are to reflect on whether the actions that you have taken have contributed to you achieving your goals and to identify any further actions that you need to take. The final section of this module will help you to do this.