Professional and Contextual Studies 2 22/01/14

Today we had to write about PESTEL and SWOT. These are things that could affect and influence our work that often can be beyond our control. These are both reflective terms to help us improve our reflective writing. To be honest, I did feel that these exercises were very useful, and it felt a lot clearer what it is we had to write about in our reflective journals.

SWOT stands for:

Strengths. (skills, positive qualities, advantages, resources, and strengths other people see)
Weaknesses (improvements, risks, what other people see as weaknesses)
Opportunities (events, jobs, volunteering, activities, advertising, self promotion)
Threats (cost, commitments, other's work, technology, weaknesses, social and family commitments, accident and emergency)

In the lecture today we had to write a list about what we thought our personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats were, and what we thought other people thought these were in us. Even though eventually I listed a lot of my strengths, I naturally find it hard to do so. To make the lecture feel more involved and interactive, I asked the other students what they thought my strengths/weaknesses etc. were, and I helped some of them with what I felt their strengths, weaknesses etc. were too. Although the other students are Photography students, and therefore not in any of my other lectures, they did give me some very good things to write about, and I gave them some good ideas too.

Not only did I think about my Foundation Degree during this exercise, but also skills I've acquired on my placement as well. My placement is going very well, and I can think of lots of good and creative ideas, but I feel that my confidence could be improved and that I am very hard on myself when I make mistakes. I recorded all of this in this exercise.

PESTEL stands for:

Political Factors, such as: funding for projects, taxes, and foreign trade.

Economic Factors, such as: money for software, insurance, money for technology, income, project budget, change in pay.

Social Factors, such as: People skills, helping others, promotion of work, advertising, education.

Technological Factors, such as: access to software, internet access, portability, new technological discoveries, new updated technology, technology becoming out of date.

Environmental Factors, such as: extreme weather conditions, access to different places, energy costs.

Legal Factors, such as: copyrighting others work, protecting and backing up original ideas, backing up work, health and safety, responsibility for others, employment, product safety.