Professional Studies 2015 Evaluation

For the professional studies module this year I decided to focus on the career of Blogging. Learning outcome one was “Demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of professional practice in the relevant creative industry and the career opportunities within it”. I feel that I have fulfilled this. I have researched blogging as a career very well and documented my findings on my blog, which involved writing about the various factors in blogging professionally and interviewing existing bloggers to see what their thoughts were and how they blog. I also researched the necessary qualifications and skills needed to be a professional blogger and wrote about this as a section in my report. The second learning outcome was “Analyse, interpret and apply research and data from a variety of sources appropriate to the identification of your own career aspirations”. I feel that I did this very well because I made sure that I collected data from a variety of sources and I also made sure that I got different types of data, applying research method skills I had to make sure I had collected an ample amount of data to reach a valid and reliable conclusion. I made sure that I collected data from primary sources which were surveys and interviews, and also secondary sources which were websites and online articles. I also collected a variety of quantitative and qualitative data so that I could analyse the data collected in different ways to explore my research further. From doing this research I identified the career aspiration of becoming a better blogger with the aim of eventually turning blogging into a career, and decided to base my report on finding out how to do this. The final learning outcome was “Select and apply appropriate presentation methods for reports and professional documents” and I feel that I also did this well because I learned how to use Adobe InDesign so that I could present my work appropriately and I put these skills into practice when I was writing my report. I also applied these skills, as well as other skills in Photoshop and Illustrator to create my personal creative CV and I am very pleased with the result. I also managed to create a multi-page PDF document to showcase my work which acts as a digital portfolio which I can continue to build on throughout my professional career. My blogging skills have also improved during this module because I have written a number of long posts on my blog linking to my chosen career and I have set them out appropriately so that they will be appealing to my blog’s audience. Overall I have enjoyed this module and I think that I have learned a lot from it. The conclusion I came to in my report will help me in the future to become a better blogger which can hopefully lead to a blogging career in the future. If I was to do this module again I think the one thing that I would change would be to manage my time better because I would have liked more time to further experiment with and develop my digital portfolio.

Lauren xxx