PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN

Personal Development Plan



Personal Development Plan

Introduction

In recent years, the international community has increasingly prioritized capacity building as essential to development. While a range of interventions are used to build capacity, such as policy advice, on-the-job technical assistance and mentoring schemes, training remains one of the primary tools used to achieve capacity enhancement goals. Given the limited success of many capacity development initiatives to date, there is increasing recognition of the lack of adequate evaluative tools for both measuring the success of capacity building initiatives and learning how to improve these initiatives. As was noted by Whyte in a landscape review of donor trends in capacity building, donors have paid considerably less attention to monitoring and evaluating their capacity development support than to evaluating other types of programming. This omission has been attributed in part to the lack of evaluative tools that can accurately assess the contribution of any one intervention to capacity building goals. There are several processes required to implement the personal development plan. Each of them has their own value because of the different factors related to the concept of personal development plan. Therefore, all the issues related to Personal Development Plan will be discussed in detail.

Learning Outcome 1

International development strategies have evolved over the past few decades to place increasing emphasis on national capacity building as a key driver of development. Post-WWII development theorists tended to see development as being solely a matter of investment. It was commonly believed that, for developing countries to progress, all that was needed was an influx of financial capital which could be used to build infrastructure and create jobs. By the late 1970s, however, the developing world was on the verge of crisis after decades of borrowing foreign capital to finance large-scale infrastructure projects had not only failed to jump-start economies, but had resulted in crippling debt for some countries. Faith in the power of investment was replaced in academic and practitioner literature with an insistence on the necessity of economic policy reform for growth (Brodkey, 1987, 112).

Throughout the 1980s and through much of the 1990s, donors used structural adjustment programs to compel developing countries to liberalize their economies, balance their budgets and shrink their governments. However, when these reforms also failed to result in significant economic progress in the least developed countries, it became apparent that, just as capital investments not guided by sensible public policies would not result in transformation of the developing world, so economic reform would fail if policies were imposed from the outside without the indigenous state capacity to adapt policies to local needs and to implement them in an efficient, effective and transparent manner. Personal development is the “process of growth, evolution, expansion, and maturation of the individual self. Psychosocial theories describe development as occurring in stages or completed tasks with individuals changing how they may feel, behave, or interpret their experiences as a result of growing cognitive capabilities and environmental ...