Research On Continuing Professional Development Of Human Resource Development Professionals

The research examines Continuing Professional Development of Human Resource Development Professionals (HRD Professionals) in enterprises. The thesis focuses on the life stories of eight HRD professionals, and explores the question of how is the lived experience of HRD professionals'Continuing Professional Development through Lived Experience Research of qualitative research methodology. It presents a life picture of HRD professionals'Continuing Professional Development and also interprets and reflects the nature and meaning behind their lived experience.Lived Experience of qualitative research put forward by Van Manen is adopted as the research methodology of the study. Eight HRD professionals are selected as research participants from Shanghai Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment. The stories of eight HRD professionals'Continuing Professional Development are described and presented with the research procedure including depth interview, text transcription, thematic analysis, meaning interpretation and thematic confirmation etc. Based on above, four themes are summarized:(1) "Ambition" is unlimited. It describes the amibiton path of HRD which includes planning for the future, enrich myself, realize self-value; (2) "Change" is too fast. It interprets the influence on changes of organizational environments, professional field, and career development; (3) "Learning" is everywhere. It describles some learning ways of HRD professionals which are learning by doing, cultural influence learning, and interaction in professional community. (4) "Growing" is a pain. It interprets HRD professionals' puzzlement among work, learning and family as well as role paradox in the eyes of organization and individual. All the themes present the picture of HRD professionals' life span and life meaning of continuing professional development.Based on phenomenon description of lived experience of eight HRD professionals, four findings are interpreted to show the nature and meaning of continuing professional development, they are (1) Motivation:Origin of Continuing Professional Development; (2) Environment:Activator of Continuing Professional Development; (3) Interaction:Method of Continuing Professional Development. (4) Role Paradox:Obstacle of Continuing Professional Development. The model map of continuing professional development of HRD professionals is proposed on the basis of the research findings and practices of HRD professionals'continuing professional development. Finally some proposals are given for HRD professionals and relevant organizations, and future researches as well.The research framework will be as follows:Chapter One:The prelude introduces research background, reasons to select research topic, research purpose, research questions, research importance and several important concepts related.Chapter Two:Literature review. This chapter defines concepts related to Human Resource Development, and examines the roles of HRD professionals, professional competency, career development and continuing professional development, which provide strong theoretical base for the following research. In the end, this chapter summarizes previous relevant studies, and further proposes the question of the study.Chapter Three:Research methodology and Research design. First of all, the chapter explains why lived experience research is chosen as research methodology for the study, and then describes this methodology, characteristics, basic procedures and interpretative phenomenology. Then this chapter introduces research design including depth interview, participant selection, site selection, thematic analysis, and meaning understanding and so on. Researcher role and ethics in qualitative research are discussed later on. Finally, Reliability and Validity in qualitative research are confirmed from the four aspects, they are respectively trustable, convertible, reliable, and research confirmation.Chapter Four:Thematic analysis. Life stories of eight participants are described and laid out according to different themes and sub-themes. Their life stories are presented from four perspectives of "Ambition", "Change", "Learning" and "Growing" in the practices of continuing professional development.Chapter Five:Analysing and interpreting meaning of lived experience. Phenomenon description is only the first step of lived experience research, but the focus will be how to interpret and understand the nature and meaning behind the phenomenon. Then four findings are shown to explain and interpret the stories of HRD professionals'continuing professional development, which are origin, activator, interaction and obstacles of Continuing Professional Development.Chapter Six:Research result summarization and suggestions. Based on research findings of the stories of HRD professionals'continuing professional development, the model is proposed to describe the practice connections of continuing professional development of HRD professionals. In addition, some suggestions are proposed to HRD professionals and relevant organizations. Finally, the researcher points out some limitations of the research and proposes further research suggestions in the future.