Defining Your Placement Learning Goals

  Order Description   A large portion of your year-end final report should discuss not only what you did while at your placement, but also clearly describe how you’ve grown with your experiences. Growth can be measured in a number of ways, including (but not limited to) proficiency and mastery in applying the academic skills you learned while at UTM, the development of transferable/soft skills (communicating with, working with and interacting with others in a professional manner), and acquiring new skills you were not taught while in the classroom (for example, public speaking). A successful discussion of the gains you made over the year is entirely dependent on your ability to assess the amount of progress you made towards achieving the initial goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the year. Now that you’ve had a chance to go into your placement and familiarize yourself with the project(s) you’ll be working on, the next step is to define your learning goals or learning objectives at this placement. In this week’s class session, you participated in a number of exercises to help you identify your interests, your values and your skills. You also had a chance to work with a classmate to identify some basic goals that you’d like to achieve by the end of your 200 hours of work with your supervisor and the skills you would need to continue to develop in order to accomplish those goals.   Reflect on what you learned about yourself in these exercises. In particular, you should follow the legal-sized handout you received in class as a guide: o Start with where you currently are (top-left quadrant): discuss your interests using the Holland Code of Interests exercise, the skills you selected from the stack and the values that you identify with the most. o Then discuss your career goals (top-right quadrant): Take time to be specific about what skills you’ll need for the future career and tasks you have in mind. Do the skills and values you mentioned above match the skills and values of the career goal you’ve described? o Move onto describing the gaps that exists between where you currently are and where you want to be (bottom left): of the skills described above, which ones do you currently lack, what type of experiences do you need to gain before reaching the career goal, are there specific types of training and certifications you need to acquire along the way? o Finally, and most importantly, follow up with describing your placement objectives as a plan to bridge that gap: specifically, what is a measurable goal that you can push yourself to achieve that would allow you to fill in some those gaps described above? Describe some of these goals and how it would bring you closer to the career you’d like to work towards. Remember, the key to this assignment is to describe the goals in a way that can be measurable. This is the major purpose of the assignment; all previous bullet points described above are building up to this final portion of the assignment. If the goals are not objectively measurable, you will lose significant marks and your assignment will be considered incomplete. In the final report, you should be able to reflect on the goals you set for yourself and assess whether or not you were successful in reaching that goal. For example, if one of skills you’d like to achieve is to become a better public speaker or to give better presentations, your measurable goal might be described as: “Before each presentation, I’d like to develop a habit of practicing the presentation on my own, and follow it up by making the presentation to a trusted friend/colleague at work.” Even though you might not be a professional speaker by the end of the academic year, at least you can say that you made the habit of practicing before the presentations, which would improve your ability to deliver presentations and increase your confidence overtime.