Social Service Professional Development
As a keen observer and a listener, Raja draws deep insight about professional development challenges in the Social Service sector. Having high degree of association skills, he is successfully able to connect workforce developments issues with innovative ideas.
He stays afresh by maintaining the perspective of an entrepreneur and thinks beyond established industry standards. He has a high level of tolerance towards failures and rejections and sees this as an opportunity to reflect on his plans and learn from the mistakes he has made. He is always excited about developing new programmes, models and initiatives, by creating a sense of urgency and looking everywhere for ways to improve them. He has been proactive yet persistent in what he believes
in and he would constantly work on a particular opportunity until he is fully satisfied with the outcome.
He firmly believes that traditional learning options alone will not be sufficient to meet the needs of the workforce. Social Service sector, which is highly evidence based-practice based, he envisions the need for workplace based informal and social learning to compliment its current practice of learning in classroom. He explains that the professionals are more in the need of ‘know-how’ rather than ‘know-what’, hence there needs to be a system or a platform where knowledge seeker is able to able to harness the power of knowledge and information in a community based model.
Based on this hypothesis, Raja initiated and rolled out ‘Gatherhere’. It is an online portal developed to build a community of passionate and knowledge-empowered social service professionals where individuals and organisation can create learning communities and social groups. In addition to informal learning, the portal has social learning features such as social media learning, social tools e.g. ask a question, follow a profile and like a comment, polls, surveys, posts and blogs. Contributor and knowledge seeker earns points and their ranking is available through leadership boards.
He stays afresh by maintaining the perspective of an entrepreneur and thinks beyond established industry standards. He has a high level of tolerance towards failures and rejections and sees this as an opportunity to reflect on his plans and learn from the mistakes he has made. He is always excited about developing new programmes, models and initiatives, by creating a sense of urgency and looking everywhere for ways to improve them. He has been proactive yet persistent in what he believes
in and he would constantly work on a particular opportunity until he is fully satisfied with the outcome.
He firmly believes that traditional learning options alone will not be sufficient to meet the needs of the workforce. Social Service sector, which is highly evidence based-practice based, he envisions the need for workplace based informal and social learning to compliment its current practice of learning in classroom. He explains that the professionals are more in the need of ‘know-how’ rather than ‘know-what’, hence there needs to be a system or a platform where knowledge seeker is able to able to harness the power of knowledge and information in a community based model.
Based on this hypothesis, Raja initiated and rolled out ‘Gatherhere’. It is an online portal developed to build a community of passionate and knowledge-empowered social service professionals where individuals and organisation can create learning communities and social groups. In addition to informal learning, the portal has social learning features such as social media learning, social tools e.g. ask a question, follow a profile and like a comment, polls, surveys, posts and blogs. Contributor and knowledge seeker earns points and their ranking is available through leadership boards.