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Growing Your AHP Career
Supporting people as they study, qualify and start their AHP careers is a strategic and operational priority. It is essential that we build strong foundations on which to develop careers so that fit with lives outside of work and enable us all to make choices so we can all thrive.
We know that people choose to leave the AHP professions for many reasons including the lack of career development opportunities. Yet this is often centred around conversations that focus on promotion within one place and we know that climbing the career ladder is not for everyone.
There is an alternative narrative for career conversations which focuses on growth. This narrative supports us to think about and explore diverse AHP career opportunities. Growth includes vertical moves (e.g., promotions), lateral moves (e.g., across departments or moving into education, research and leadership roles) and growing our capabilities to add breadth and depth to grow and stay in one place.
One way to structure growth-based career conversations is the Kawa approach. Kawa is Japanese for river. It invites us to think about our careers as individual rivers (not ladders), showing that they are part of the wider AHP ecosystem. It helps us to understand the past, the present and the future, as well as the personal factors that support us to make career decisions.
On this page you will find a range of resources to support growth-based (Kawa) career planning. The number of resources will also grow as the work evolves.
More details can be found here on the growth-based career planning web page.
The concepts were tested across 3 webinars and a recording of this can be viewed below.
Read the key findings of the webinars.
Access the presentation slide deck (PDF) here.
This work has also been published by The College of Paramedics, access the website here: College of Paramedics June 2023