Professional development is an important part of professional practice in my belief and would be considered an ongoing process that continues over the course of your career, adapting to changes in practice environments, professional domains, new information and consumer needs. I have carefully tailored my professional development to promote competency and relevance in practice, which in turn assists members of the public who seek psychology services. The areas of professional development in which I have chosen to focus are on are primarily within the psychological education space both within organisations and expanding this into our communities. I have chosen to be a facilitator of mental health first aid within our organisation and I believe that this has been an assets in increasing mental health literacy. Whilst I do develop and deploy a number of bespoke programs on a range of mental health issues, the firm founding that this program offers, the universal techniques and most importantly the wealth of evidence behind the effectiveness of this program make this a great addition to any community. One of the other advantages of delivering this program is it allows be to keep in touch with my clients both within the business and externally, and as professionals I believe that we should be well informed on the environment that our clients exist in as much as is practicle.

I recently began working with the New South Wales Mental Health Commission, which has allowed me to keep in contact with community and professional services that exist not only within greater Sydney but nationally. This has also opened up a number of opportunities to speak at professional conferences within the psychology space. These conferences are a great way to hear about cutting-edge research done on populations relevant to my career as an organisational psychologist operating in Australia. I have also attended a number of online seminars run by the Australian Psychology Society, one of the advantages of the COVID pandemic is that many seminars shifted to online which increased my access to a range of subjects. The most recent of which I found to be incredibly informative was by Dr Mark van Vug from the University of Amsterdam and looked at the evolutionary psychology of leadership.