What Is Professional Development

A Critical Examination of the Professional Development Literature Related to Business

Introduction

Knapp (2003, p.112) treats professional development in its broadest sense as ‘the full range of activities, formal and informal, that engage teachers or administrators in new learning about their professional practice’. The University of Management and Technology notes the use of this phrase from 1857 onwards, which has been the focus of the education system for teachers to learn and change (Garet et al., 2001). Nowadays, facing with great challenges such as knowledge to use new tools and skills to process incredible amounts of information, which keeps rapidly changing, enterprising individuals have no choice but to involve themselves in the

Motives like collegial interaction, job security and social commitment also deter learners (Gould et al., 2007). On the other hand, three main categories of deterrents have been observed for further learning engagement, namely situation barriers, institutional barriers and dispositional barriers. Recently, more research declares that the former two referring to lack of money and time and inappropriate schedules are the dominated reasons for non-participation in professional learning (Cushion et al., 2010). Debates like these on professional learning have lasted for decades, not only about the basic theories, but also approaches in specific practice. Meanwhile, professional development opportunities are usually considered to be deficient and disappointing especially within business (Fraser and Schwind, 2011). Therefore, the purpose of this review is to provide a critical examination of literature on professional development and attempt to identify where business sits in these arguments based on empirical

8). In this sense, there is every likelihood that learning takes place in much more informal situations than formal ones. According to Malcolm et al., (2003), informal learning is more likely to occur when learning is not the goal of activities. Besides, Cervero (1992) maintains that professionals can achieve more useful knowledge from practice than any other formal education. However, it may be argued that informal learning with unstructured and irregular nature may result in uncritical outcomes (Coshion et al.,