The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of self development education. To this end, the paper presents a discussion of the relevance of self development education to society, the procedures and practices used in self-development education. Further, the paper describes the personal involvement of this writer in the field of self development education and delineates important people and sources of information within the field.
Relevance of Self Development Education To Society
Self development education can be defined as elective educational courses taken by individuals for the purposes of developing their personal and/or professional lives. The field is important to society in several ways. First, in terms of one's profession or career, self-development education is beneficial on both the organizational and individual level. In today's business climate it takes continuing career education to deal with aggressive competition and continuing technological upgrades in companies and organizations; companies which do not involve their employees in self development education efforts aimed at upgrading their skills cannot meet these challenges, and people whose skills do not meet the higher and higher standards being required are either not hired or are laid off after a period of work (Aaron, 1995).
A second way in which self-development education is relevant to society concerns its psychosocial benefits. Educational research has shown that working age adults have used self-development education towards the goals of promotion and job security while older retired adults participating in self-development education have increased their cognitive functioning (Papalia & Olds, 1995). Moreover, the expansion of their minds and skills afforded to mature adults by such classes and courses has been found to help them to make their leisure time more productive and interesting (Papalia & Olds, 1995).
An example of the re...