reflective essay on career development

Personal, Professional, and Career Development Reflective Essay

Personal and career purpose, career decision.

The ideal development of a person follows a unique route directing resources, facilities, capabilities, abilities, potentials, and interest among other in a line of presumed achievement. Most researchers argue that there are intuitive characters and motivations that shape how an individual grows and becomes prevalent in a community.

Essentially, these developments are associated with personalities, professionalism, career and career paths. There are processes and tactical handling of issues that must be conjoined to direct growth and development on these four aspects. In this regard, it is apparent that the fundamentality of managing and planning these attributes is beyond reproach.

An individual needs to set a line of interests to ensure that his or her working path has objectives and goals. In this manner, the person can develop personality, career and become a professional in his or her area. This paper evaluates a case of development in various aspects and comparisons. In a bid to perform this task, I have evaluated my strategy while striving to develop into a career warranting me a sustainable future.

The presence of a goal or a future aspiration allows me to plan and change my attitudes and characters. Primarily, individual characters determine the people I can interact with and set my social class into a disclosed discourse. The most tactical strategies may involve developing skills and experiences through employment and education.

First, education has allowed me to gain skills and attain credential for employment with reputable and well paying firms. Several personalities like patience and persistence have developed subconsciously and through training systems. Such personalities have significant outcomes in the real life. They make me competitive while searching for employment or any other work related issue.

These situations revealed that I knew how to outline my plan in creating meaning to every situation. At several instances I have managed to create and organize peoples into groups handling various issues as well as lead them tactically pursuant of my leadership dreams. Furthermore, I had managed to identify opportunity where I could develop my talents as I proceeded with further studies.

I have become an experienced and competitive artisan in a way that I can use it to earn a living. Furthermore, it is apparent that people are convinced by my inspirational encouragements, which attract them towards personal development. Therefore, I have become a person to encourage and motivate others.

These aspects are part of a plan developing my skills and experiences to facilitate the integration of huger ideas and knowledge. They have allowed me to attain insight into various levels of my career. Tactically, there have been adequate concerns regarding the credibility of ideas.

Motivation is an aspect that can be implemented to improve the performance of employees and boosting their tactical approaches in attaining customer satisfaction. Essentially, maintaining the workforce of a business in a critical tool for ensuring that secrets and skills are retained within the business. This aspect implies that a business must be conscious about the working conditions of its esteems employees.

In fact, most of the employees working in such a business as the Luxury Hotel undertake shores within a career path where they improve their skills. The employees become the managers and end up becoming significant operators for business proceedings. In this regard, it is vital to create a system that allows employees to show their competitiveness and abilities.

The management may formulate model involving increment in salaries, elevating the working class, and initiating competition plan involving winning prizes among others. All these aspects do not only improve the overall business performance, but also isolate the dedicated employees to work and become future managerial workforce.

The employee would view this process of reward as an opportunity to earn extra income and attain better-working conditions within the business. In essence, some issues related to authoritative management may be transformed to situations where employees work under minimal supervision since they have set goals at a personal level.

This research presents these incentives and shows how they are applied to become beneficial to an organization. In so doing, it reaches the managerial and non-managerial workforce to attain all diverse incentives that may assist businesses to become productive and inspiring.

In essence, the process of making this decision was consistent to some of the theories of decision making. It is an indication that people make decisions in ways that can be generalized to apply to majority. Evidently, the process was characterized by some aspects envisaged in bounded rationality.

The theory of bounded rationality reveals that there are two systems of thoughts, including emotional and rational approaches to decision making (Schiavone 2011). When the parents were making this decision, the mother had taken an emotional approach while the father was rational. Clearly, the mother feared that the financial and moral destructions were beyond repair.

She felt that the family might become financially incapacitated if they bought the private school. However, she did not have the actual figures to support the fact that the current financial capability of the family could not handle the destructions. In essence, it was a decision that was based merely on the outward perception of the school rather than facts.

On the other hand, the father argued that the mismanagement prevailing in the school wasted the lives of many pupils. As a result, it was important to offer a solution to the problem. In his case, he stated that there were two options that included building another school or acquiring the existing one. However, he argued that building another school was more costly that acquisition.

Further, he pointed out that the family cannot make a conclusion on whether the investment was too taxing without getting all the facts first. He also indicated that the family would invest despite financial incapability because he was confident that the school could bring good returns if it were managed correctly.

The theory of common biases was also evident in this entire scenario and the holistic process of making the decision. In this regard, the misconception of chance was the most evident bias. The theory states that people have a tendency to misconceive that the probability of getting a certain outcome is less than another one (Adair 2010). This perception is informed by emotions and past experiences (Choi 2011).

However, present and future events are not necessarily consistent with the past ones (Xu 2011). In this case, the mother had a misconceived perception that the chances of succeeding in an attempt to renovate and improve the school were minimal. However, this perspective was not informed by factual financial figures that could provide a rationale. In essence, it can be considered as a perfect case of misconceived chance.

In a broader perspective, it cannot be disputed resolutely that people are more pessimistic about success (Dolton 2011). Only a few people who have strong will, passion, and determination envisage optimism. As such, the mother was a victim of this general condition since she did not find a good chance of success.

Besides the two theories of decision making, the process also envisaged clear indications of heuristics. In theoretical understanding, heuristics purports that people have certain ways of simplifying information and factor of decision making (Missier 2011). These simplifications create a situation in which the decision maker does not consider the factors with due diligence.

Further, the theory asserts that simplifying the aspects of decision making might lead to a misconception of the reality (Nooraie 2011). Such misconceptions are informed by concentrating on the wrong focus and disregarding the real one (Su 2011). For example, the father asserted that acquiring a constructed school is less costly than building a new one.

However, it is evident that the school, which was in question, had gained a bad reputation among parents and was in a financial crisis. As a result, the cost of acquisition was not the only factor in decision making. Instead, it was important to consider other crucial factors such as reputation and precedence. Whereas these two aspects were important to the investment decision, the father overlooked them.

This ignorance and assumption were caused by the simplification of the scenario in a manner that considered cost as the only important variable.

As a result, it can be concluded that bounded rationality, common biases, and heuristics were among the critical decision-making theories that characterized the entire process of purchasing the school. Indeed, this process contained two parties and hence the analysis is based on both of them.

Having reflected on the event that took place when the decision was being made by the parents, there were critical undertaking that were crucial to notice. First, rationality is a better approach to making a decision that emotional perspective. When a decision makers embrace rationality, they can conceptualize issues from a sober position. In that regard, their decisions are not hasty.

Instead, they are procedural and sequential in nature. Therefore, the approach allows the decision maker to pass through the necessary steps when making a determination. For example, the father’s rationality enabled him to wait and assess the financial requirements before dismissing the acquisition.

On the other hand, an emotional approach is a fundamentally flawed method of making decisions. In this regard, decision makers who used this method rush to determine the way forward without deep and profound considerations. For example, the mother had already dismissed the acquisition of the schools just because of the fear that the family was going to run short of funds.

Whereas this was the core determining factor of her decision, she did not have any convincing figures to show that the family would become incapacitates if they purchased the school. Biases are also important when it comes to the decision-making process. In fact, it is evident that people become biased even without noticing.

Lastly, I would have made this decision in a pretty different manner than how it was done in this case. Personally, I would have talked to some able parents and friends about the challenges facing the school and the community. In the discussion, the issue of poor management and quality of the education provided in the school could be the core agendas.

Afterwards, I would propose to join hands with those colleagues and acquire the school as a group. This decision could have been better than the latter because the potential financial risk would be shared. Additionally, acquiring the school as a group would eliminate the notion of private school and bring a picture of a community-based school.

In essence, this would be an appropriate strategy for removing the bad reputation that had been painted by the previous management. Further, managing the school as a group would allow the availability of diverse intellectual ideas of improving it.

The management of virtual teams may depict various fundamental challenges. The researchers laying arguments in the literature depict the need and effectiveness of virtual teams. They are identified as prevailing businesses effective in reaching the final outcomes of the researchers. The developments of the virtual teams are improving continuously as the information technology proceeds to attain integration across the globe.

The review indicates the proper management allows the teams to attain clients and loyalty for the services they offer. The use of internet in reaching their target members depict the impending quorum required. Presently, the teams have managed to penetrate and unity many people across the globe making the accessibility of services such as marketing easy. The virtual teams have allowed globalization to take place easily.

In fact, such social companies do make not only huge profits due to the prevalence of members and common interests, but also creates global civilization and understanding of cultural differences. Such interactions are similar to the application of virtual teams in handling issues throughout the globe. They bring the human resources at one point where they may be accessed and exploited by firms or business easily.

The most fundamental achievement of the development is attaining a workforce striving the meet the company goals in a willing manner. In businesses that do not consider motivating the employees, their work is usually directed by the salary earning the get from the business.

However, the motivation oriented workforce does not target the salaries solely. The workforce works hard to attain salaries among other benefits being offered. In fact, businesses managed through authoritative systems fail the employees in working effectively due to lack of peaceful and free mind. In this regard, there must be proper developmental capabilities to deal with issues personally and organizationally.

Adair, J 2010, Decision making and problem solving strategies , Kogan Page, London.

Choi, A 2011, Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making Based On Probabilistic Estimation with Contextual Information For Physiological Signal Monitoring, International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making , vol. 10 no. 1, pp. 109.

Dolton, T 2011, Medical Decision Making: Supplement Policy. Medical Decision Making , vol. 31 no. 3, pp. 376-377.

Missier, F 2011, Decision-making Competence, Executive Functioning, and General Cognitive Abilities, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making , vol. 7, 127-129.

Nooraie, M 2011, Decision’s familiarity and strategic decision-making process output: the mediating impact of rationality of the decision-making process, International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences , vol. 4 no. 4, pp. 385.

Schiavone, F 2011, Strategic reactions to technology competition: A decision-making model, Management Decision , vol. 49 no. 5, pp. 801-809.

Su, Z 2011, A Hybrid Fuzzy Approach to Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Group Decision-Making. International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making , vol. 10 no. 4, pp. 695.

Xu, Z 2011, Approaches to Multi-Stage Multi-Attribute Group Decision Making, International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making , vol. 10 no. 1, pp. 121.

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Roelle Ann Santa Maria

May 10th, 2021, reflecting and reimagining your career plan in a challenging context.

1 comment | 4 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

What comes to mind when you’re starting to think about your career? Linear? Uncertainty? Time-bound? A ladder? It’s important to understand that you have to be flexible and adaptable whilst planning for your career. 

Just like life itself, your career journey is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Great things take time to come to fruition! Instead, when it comes to career planning: start early, prepare, have a strategy, and persevere.  There are usually three stages of job hunting:

• Pre-searching/preparation i.e., career planning
• Active searching.
• Preparing to apply.

In this two-part blog series, we cover the first stage by helping you to: (1) understand yourself and list out your options before finally bringing it all together to (2) create a strategy in order for you to transition into the next stages as seamlessly as possible. 

Reflecting on yourself and career path

Underlying any career decision and building a good strategy requires an understanding of yourself . Consider the following: 

Values –  What is important to me? “I value being respected and working alongside others.” In a career, what motives and drives you to align with an organisation? How visible do you want to be? How quickly do you want to make an impact? There will be no definitive or stable list of what you value in a career, but it’s always good to think about it! 

Interests –   What do I like to do? “I enjoy meeting new people and travelling.” In your career, can you bring your interests into the career plan? For instance, if you have a masters, how can you combine this with other experiences in your career plan? *link*

Skills and abilities –  What am I good at? “I know how to read and write fluently in two languages.” For a career, what qualities or skills do you have that make you stand out? Ask yourself what you can bring to the organisation. 

Strengths –  What comes easily to me? “I’m good at linguistics and learning languages.” In your portfolio of skills, hobbies, and talents, which ones do you enjoy and what comes easily to you? 

Motivators –  What am I passionate about? “I care about sustainability and people.” For a career, what values and passions do you have that align with an organisation? 

Assets –  What experiences do I have? “I was the president of my club and worked in customer service.” List out your experiences and what you can offer, or perhaps a unique selling point that helps differentiate you from other candidates. 

Reflecting on your motivations, hobbies, skill set, the factors that drive you to pursue this path, and seeing whether you align with an organisation’s values are important in order to develop a healthy and positive mindset! 

Re-imagining your career options

Think of the unthinkable, expect the unexpected 

In times of uncertainty, our vision can narrow and we might lose sight of our of opportunities and chances that are available to us. Therefore. . .

Diversify and invest in your many future selves. 

The breadth of possibilities and outcomes — positive or negative — are endless in a challenging context. Some of your existing career plans and labour markets you were looking into could have spiralled out of control. 

Don’t put your eggs in one basket, and don’t presume there’s only one basket available . In this context, the fewer jobs and opportunities you apply for that you are capable of results in greater risks or scarcity. 

That being said, none of us know what the future holds, thus envisioning a career ladder or a single road isn’t always the most helpful or accurate thing to do. Instead, think of your career journey as a series of twists and turns — crossroads. 

The crossroads model

It may seem that going up a single career ladder is the norm. In reality, there’s a lot of lateral movement (across sectors and industries), changing locations, or even shifting career paths. In this kind of environment, being flexible and adaptable — constantly redeveloping or reinventing yourself — is the healthiest way to plan your career. 

• The road that beckons : what have you always wanted to try?
• The road that I imagine in my wildest dreams : what do you dream of? 
• The road that seems most sensible to me : the one that people whose opinion I value would suggest to me. 
• The road not travelled : one you have never considered before.
• The road I have already been down.
• The road back : going back to a place you felt safe.

In other words, when we head to a particular destination, we don’t always take the main road. Oftentimes, we find ourselves taking the road less travelled, taking shortcuts by meandering through smaller streets. In other words, don’t be afraid to walk the off-beaten path, after all it may bring you to your goals faster. 

If you find yourself needing additional support thinking about your options or navigating your career, you can always speak to a careers consultant here at LSE Careers. Book a confidential one-to-one appointment on CareerHub .

Note: This blog is the first blog of a two-part blog series from our Career planning in a challenging context event.  

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Don’t Underestimate the Power of Self-Reflection

• James R. Bailey
• Scheherazade Rehman

Focus on moments of surprise, failure, and frustration.

Research shows the habit of reflection can separate extraordinary professionals from mediocre ones. But how do you sort which experiences are most significant for your development?

• To answer this questions, the authors asked 442 executives to reflect on which experiences most advanced their professional development and had the most impact on making them better leaders.
• Three distinct themes arose through their analysis: surprise, frustration, and failure. Reflections that involved one or more or of these sentiments proved to be the most valuable in helping the leaders grow.
• Surprise, frustration, and failure. Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. These parts of you are constantly in motion and if you don’t give them time to rest and reflect upon what you learned from them, you will surely fatigue.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Empathy, communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, compassion. These are all skills you need to thrive in the workplace and become a great leader. Time and again, we even hear that these capabilities are the key to making yourself indispensable — not just now but far into the future. Soft skills, after all, are what make us human, and as far as we know, can’t be performed well by technologies like artificial intelligence.

• James R. Bailey is professor and Hochberg Fellow of Leadership at George Washington University. The author of five books and more than 50 academic papers, he is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, The Hill, Fortune, Forbes, and Fast Company and appears on many national television and radio programs.
• Scheherazade Rehman is professor and Dean’s Professorial Fellow of International Finance. She is director of the European Union Research Center and former Director of World ExecMBA with Cybersecurity, has appeared in front of the U.S. House and Senate, and been a guest numerous times onPBS Newshour, the Colbert Report, BBC World News, CNBC, Voice of America, and C-Span.

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Reflecting for employability

A key element of being successful in today’s society is building your employability. Reflection is an essential part of this process.

Reflection is a skill that can serve you well throughout life. It can benefit you while being educated, developing while working, and it can support you with entrepreneurship and building up your general ability to get employed and be adaptable and successful, i.e. your employability.

The video below provides a quick overview.  The rest of the page provides more details and actions you can take.

What is employability

Employability is ‘a set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy. (Yorke, 2004, page 21).

A common misconception about employability is that it is the same as being employed and getting a job, or that having high levels of employability will guarantee you a job. As is it clear from the definition, employability is more an ongoing state of being capable to exist and build success in job market.

Reflection is essential for building employability

Developing employability often means using reflection to make the most of experiences – these can be from university courses, work (full-time or part-time), interests, volunteering, or caring responsibilities.

Reflection can help you to identify what skills you have utilised and developed through these experiences and build your sense of self-awareness. An important aspect of employability arises when you manage to combine all your experiences, your skills, and self-awareness into a story that is explicit to you and that you can effectively and positively communicate to others.

Reflection will help you to surface otherwise unknown elements of your employability story

One element common to both employability and reflection is the idea of drawing out learning, development, and abilities that would otherwise have remained unrecognised and unknown. Reflection is often identified as the mechanism for making the implicit explicit to ourselves.

For instance, when working you might often have to rely on effective interpersonal communication when engaging with customers/clients, and may have on multiple occasions had to deescalate building conflict. People in those situations sometimes fail to identify ‘conflict management’ as one of their skills, and often do not recognise such experiences as examples of effective interpersonal skills, even when asked in job interviews.

Reflection would in that situation help you to identify your strengths and become aware about how to weave them with specific examples into your employability story.

Ways reflection can help with your employability

Reflection can help you to:

• identify the type of experiences and abilities you already have and those you are likely to need to become more employable
• identify your strengths and weaknesses and find specific situations where you have deployed them such that you can effectively communicate them to others.
• track your improvement of skills you want to develop and need for succeeding in your chosen careers
• make informed decisions about what you think success is and looks like to you personally
• identify things that you find stressful and how to deal with them – this way building resilience, a key ingredient to effective and long-term employability.

Moreover, the University have developed a series of Graduate Attributes, which have been identified to support your employability. By reflecting on and ensuring that you are developing these key attributes, you are likely to get an edge around employability.

University of Edinburgh’s Graduate Attributes (within the University website)

Written by a postgraduate student studying career guidance, read this blog for more on the value of reflection in supporting your future career and current development.

Robert Burns and the value of reflection

Using the Reflectors’ Toolkit to build employability through reflection

You can use different elements of the Reflectors’ Toolkit to build and strengthen your employability. Key sections are reflecting on experiences, reflecting on goals and objectives, building a reflective habit, and building self-awareness through reflection. Developing these will contribute to your success.

• Reflecting on experiences will help you to identify learning and build an understanding and knowledge base of how you act in a range of situations – this will be valuable when communicating about your past experiences in the job market, and give you a range of situations to draw strategies from.
• Reflecting on goals and objectives will help you track development of skills as well as of progression towards what you want in life – this will help you both communicate about and develop skills that are required to succeed in different careers.
• Building a reflective habit makes you able to quickly identify successes and mistakes and allows you to fix them immediately – a valuable skill in any profession.
• Increased self-awareness can ensure that you are navigating the job market in a way which aligns with who you are and who you want to be – especially defining what success looks like for you, becoming aware of your strengths and weakness, your values, and developing an ability to set reflective goals can make you successful.

Specific things to reflect on for employability

• It can be extremely helpful to routinely reflect on what skills you have developed over the last week/month/year and how you will be able to evidence these skills with examples.
• To identify the skills that are required in the sector you want to end up in and start developing these by setting goals and objectives.
• Reflect on how you deal with challenges and how you can improve your approach.
• Reflect on the range of experiences you have and find ways to expand this range.
• Ensure you reflect and find value in the things you do regularly. Often people forget that the things they find easy/or do frequently actually require a lot of skill.

Ensure that you don’t neglect learning

Some people might think that working part-time jobs in bars/grocery stores or being active with hobbies do not build their employability. The reality is that when a reflective mindset is adopted, you will be able to find value and learning in most situations – and realise that all your experiences help to build your unique employability story.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Growth and Development — Personal Development: Reflection and Growth

Personal Development: Reflection and Growth

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Published: Feb 7, 2024

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Table of contents

Introduction, strengths and weaknesses analysis, goal setting and action planning, feedback and self-reflection.

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Cadets earn Pershing medallion in recognition of top reflective essays through MX400

WEST POINT, N.Y. – Through the Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic (SCPME), MX400 is the superintendent’s capstone course for all U.S. Military Academy Firsties with an emphasis on an officer’s duty to provide moral leadership. The course challenges cadets to become commissioned leaders of character who demonstrate virtue, honor, patriotism and subordination to civilian authority.

A key part of the course has the cadets look both to the past and future on their own character development experiences as part of the West Point Leader Development System (WPLDS), while studying the enduring and emerging ethical challenges of the profession they are about to enter.

One of the major requirements in the course is the Gen. John J. Pershing Reflective Essay. Each year, every Firstie cadet is required to be graded on a signature writing event, which allows them to be a candidate for the Gen. John J. Pershing Writing Award.

Established and endowed in 2006 by retired Lt. Gen. John Cushman, USMA Class of 1944, the Pershing Writing Award is meant to encourage cadets to reflect on their experiences at West Point and gain a better understanding for how the institution has helped them prepare for the profession of arms and to strengthen their resolve to serve the nation honorably as a commissioned officer.

Cushman, who commanded 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, wanted to inspire cadets with an award that emphasized West Point’s significance in their development. Then, it was naming the award after one of the academy’s most influential leaders, Pershing, and accentuate his legacy and contributions to the Army and nation, highlighted by commanding the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War I. 

This year, more than 1,000 cadets from the USMA Class of 2024 authored an essay with the MX400 instructors identifying the top essays from their sections and then a selection committee reviewing all the submissions. Once the dust was settled and the choices were made, three members of the class were chosen as top essay award recipients and three were chosen for honorable mention.

The cadet authors were celebrated during the Gen. Pershing Award ceremony on May 22 at the Thayer Award Room where they received their medallions and certificates. The three cadets who earned honorable mention were Class of 2024 Cadets Reagan Warren, Christian Dionisio and Carlo Octoman. 

The top three cadets who earn medallions were Class of 2024 Cadet Maximilian Hodsden (first place, gold), Class of 2024 Cadet Brennan McAlister (second place, silver) and Class of 2024 Cadet Maximillian Renfro (third place, bronze).

One of the key elements of the Pershing Essay within the role of writing in the Army profession is encouraging deep reflection and critical thinking, which is essential for effective leadership. There are other elements that are taken into account from learning from failure and reflecting on personal experiences and lessons that may guide them as an officer.

The second-place awardee, McAlister, wrote an essay about how the death of his father at age 16 calloused him emotionally. McAlister spoke about how his father was a good man, but human flaws caused his downward spiral.

“The situation shocked me, and I became, quite frankly, a (jerk) to people and didn’t help those who were struggling since my efforts to save my dad never worked,” McAlister explained. “However, candid feedback from senior officers and growing a relationship with God through the Catholic Church helped me learn humility.”

McAlister said it was “super cool” to be recognized as an awardee, and while being grateful in receiving the second-place award, he does question his worthiness.

“I don’t think I’m cut from the same cloth as (Pershing) despite me winning second place,” he stated.

During the closing remarks, it was mentioned that the essay encourages cadets to embrace the values of Duty, Honor, Country in their future careers, however, it can come with re-evaluating that commitment due to life’s circumstances as was the case for Hodsden.

Hodsden was surprised to discover he had won the 2024 Pershing Writing Essay award from the perspective that he felt he had “so much left to say on my essay and was only able to convey only a fraction of what I wanted to.”

Hodsden said his essay reflected on going through a personal low in his life during the first semester of his Firstie year. 

“After my older sister, and best friend, Hailey Hodsden, died during the summer before my Firstie year due to Army negligence, I grew resentful of my chosen profession and became miserable in all aspects of my life,” said the Dripping Springs, Texas, native. “I struggled a great deal with depression and what I should do next. Continuing the course toward graduating and becoming a commissioned Army officer felt like betraying her memory, but leaving West Point would have betrayed the support and expectations of my family, friends and mentors.

“I wasn’t able to commit to being great and instead accepted being a terrible cadet, barely surviving instead of thriving,” he added. “Only through the help of my friends and loved ones and a gradual realization that protecting what was entrusted to me was I able to overcome my struggle and commit to my dreams again.”

His sister, who was a USMA Class of 2021 graduate, was killed while serving in Germany when a Stryker vehicle she was traveling in was struck by a civilian truck on the Autobahn.

As a Chinese major who graduated and commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Defense Artillery branch on May 25, Hodsden said this reflective essay allowed him to analyze his struggles and moral conflicts that had shaped his life and burgeoning career up to this point.

“For the longest time, I kept all of these dark thoughts and low moments to myself, but being able to share them and how I overcame them was very constructive,” Hodsden said. “Knowing how I got to such a low and how I recovered not only helps me for future challenges in my life but also today.”

During his first three years at West Point, Hodsden said he absolutely loved it at the academy and thought the “challenges and lessons all felt worthwhile and enjoyable.” Of course, that changed in a moment of tragedy, but it also made him learn more about himself.

“My final year felt like a nightmare and yet I was able to march forward and graduate with my class regardless,” he articulated. “This makes me realize that I may be more resilient than I first thought. No matter what the Army throws at me, I know nothing can ever be worse than how I felt this past semester, and I can take the lessons learned into my Army career.”

As the first-place recipient of the Pershing Essay Award, Hodsden feels honored and privileged to not only earn first place but to be associated with Gen. Pershing.

“Truthfully, I believe every cadet does and should believe that they may be the next Pershing,” Hodsden explained. “With this honor, I will have a consistent reminder of morality within the profession.”

When discussing who were the most influential people on his journey at West Point and guided him toward becoming an Army officer, two people came to mind but only one person was at the forefront of his thinking – his sister, 1st Lt. Hailey Hodsden.

“I couldn’t have made it through this place without her, and I truly loved her more than anyone else in the entire world,” he asserted through his emotions. “She motivated, inspired and led me and countless others, and she was the best officer this Army has ever seen. Because of her, I was the happiest Plebe and the saddest Firstie to ever be at West Point.

“Secondly, I would like to thank my MX400 instructor, retired Lt. Col. David Jones,” he added. “His instruction and example helped guide me and countless other cadets toward the essence of officership and professionalism. I truly feel ready for becoming an officer due to his class.”

Also awarded during the ceremony was the General of the Army Omar N. Bradley Award for Character, which is given to a cadet with a top 10 weighted composite of institutional variables relating to cadet character. The award recognizes one cadet each year who exemplifies the compassion, concern for others and leadership traits possessed by Bradley. This year’s recipient was Class of 2024 Cadet Jaques Schold, who through the words of Gen. Bradley’s late wife, Esther Dora Bradley, in her Last Will and Testament that her hope is the award may shape “another Bradley” to serve and to lead our nation in the future.

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With a rising number of artists vying for a limited number of galleries and grants, arts professionals are pivoting to careers as coaches. But can they help people profit from their talents?

By Travis Diehl

From 2005 to 2017, Paddy Johnson ran a respected art-world blog, Art F City . “Fiercely Independent,” began its tagline. But art criticism is a precarious business. She tried teaching as an adjunct, but that wasn’t much better.

Gradually, Johnson shifted to providing career counseling to artists, and helping them workshop their statements of purpose and grant applications. She realized it could be a business. In February 2021, she invited her mailing list to a webinar on the value — or not — of a fine arts degree, titled “ Is It Time to Kill the M.F.A.? ” A follow-up email included a link to “Book a free consult with our coaches.”

In May of that year, Johnson founded Netvvrk, an app-based resource for artists, with message boards, how-to guides and frequent Zoom seminars. It now has more than 900 members, most of whom pay between $49 and $87 a month.

Welcome to the vast, thorny wilderness of online artist mentoring.

With ever more artists vying for limited galleries and grants, there has been a recent flush of subscription-based, web-powered coaching and marketing programs offering advice, encouragement and feedback to creative types. This is partly a symptom of Covid, which encouraged people to embrace video calls and group chats at the same time it intensified isolation. It also reflects the growing number of midcareer artists looking for peers beyond art schools, and yearning to profit from their talents.

These groups aim to pick up where traditional art education leaves off: Artists want to know not just how to make paintings, but how to sustain a long and satisfying career.

Many of these groups’ founders were frustrated in their own careers. “I felt like a failure as a teacher and a failure as a critic,” Johnson told me. Now, rather than hustle for teaching gigs, coaches like Johnson rely on apps like Teachable and Mighty Networks to reach followers and collect dues.

The self-help genre has a reputation for selling unrealistic promises — as they say, if you want to get rich quick, write a get-rich-quick book. But, as a critic with an M.F.A., I’m a convert to one classic: Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” a workbook for unblocking creativity that has sold five million copies since 1992. Which left me wondering: Do the members of mentoring groups benefit as much as their gurus?

So, I signed up to mailing lists. I started a fresh Instagram account and followed every artist coach I could find, which attracted targeted ads from still more. I sat through sales pitches — like a free workshop on avoiding online art scams from a program called Milan Art that ended with an overview of their membership costs. I even signed up for two: Johnson’s Netvvrk and the Praxis Center for Aesthetic Studies , for a peek behind the paywall. And I asked more than a dozen of these groups’ members about their experiences.

These career support services range widely, from sales-focused to philosophical to pedagogical. Instagram teems with figures like Lloyd Coenen , a painter with a self-described “7-figure art career,” and Miriam Schulman , who calls herself “your curator of inspiration.” They post teasing tips on social media and sell marketing advice to aspiring Frida Kahlos and KAWSes. I passed up the Making Art Making Money School of Business, which sent potential students an excoriating email saying, “You’re not getting any younger.” Another service I sampled, Art Storefronts , described on its website as “An Exclusive Community of Growth-Minded Artists and Savvy Mentors,” will build you an online shop and help you self-promote.

Those who want a holistic approach to art can join artist-led groups dedicated to mutual support and demystifying the art world. On Netvvrk’s message boards, members experienced with galleries and graduate degrees share advice and cheer one another on. Emails from Brainard Carey and the Praxis Center address you with subject lines such as “ How Are You Nurturing Your Career In Bleak Mid-Winter? ” and “ Is Your Life Real? ”

And if you’re looking for something more personal, reminiscent of attending art school remotely, the consulting startup NewCrits promotes “a community of artists for the present” via hourlong virtual studio visits. West Street Coaching , a smaller outfit, also offers one-on-one meetings. The NYC Crit Club and its sister Canopy Program provide a mix of virtual classes, online critiques and in-person sessions at their Chelsea loft.

These groups aim to pick up where traditional art education leaves off: Artists want to know not just how to make paintings, but how to sustain a long and satisfying career. The coaches and advisers wrestle with the problem of success as an artist: What does it look like? How do you know when you have it? And can any amount of coaching, self-promotion or community get you there?

And all of them, to some degree, appeal to your vanity. They stoke that glowing kernel of a dream that says: You’re special. You’re an artist. You have something to offer — something that other people want to buy.

Hang Your Shingle

My introduction to Art Storefronts was an Instagram ad, styled like an urgent iPhone notification: “Reminder: Artists who join this week get free website setup and management for life!” A few clicks later, I was on Zoom getting a tour of one of the company’s tailored e-commerce sites.

The idea is simple: Artists upload high-resolution images of their work. A fulfillment center prints and ships editions direct to consumers, at different sizes, on materials that range from wall-mounted canvas and acrylic panels to yoga mats and tank tops. A.I.-powered statistical analysis tracks your potential buyers; a marketing calendar maps your social media strategy. The bespectacled sales representative showed me a summary of one artist’s yearly take: over $80,000. If I signed up in the next few hours, he said — at $1,699 upfront for the basic Bronze membership tier, plus $50 a month for the web store — they’d build my site for me. And I’d begin, supposedly, collecting cash.

Art Storefronts debuted in 2013. It now has 14,000 members. Nick Friend , the company’s chief executive and founder, graduated from U.S.C.’s Marshall School of Business. He developed the idea for Art Storefronts after starting a company that manufactures fine art papers and canvas.

As the Art Storefronts website puts it, “Selling art? Marketing is all that matters. ”

From the moment I surrendered my contact information, I sustained their hard sell: emails and text messages dangling one of a few dwindling slots in their latest limited promotion. Other emails promised further walk-throughs with satisfied Art Storefronts customers.

“I’ve noticed now so many ads, these videos, you know: Artists, I can help you make $500,000 and blah, blah, blah. And that’s always the promise,” said Karen Hutton, an accomplished landscape and travel photographer. She sells multiples through an Art Storefronts website, but that’s just one piece of a successful career. “I have a vision for what I want my business to be,” she told me. “Their business education doesn’t align with that. And that’s fine because it aligns with other people.”

Ideally, says one testosterone-laced Art Storefronts podcast episode from 2017 (removed from their website in the last several weeks), prospective members are encouraged to pass what they call the “Does My Art Suck?” test by selling their art, offline, to a stranger.

Friend told me that 20 percent of new members haven’t sold art before. Art Storefronts seemed ready to take my money, too — one marketing email said that my art had “randomly caught” a rep’s eye. But I hadn’t shown anyone any.

Telling Artists Everything

While Art Storefronts encourages artists to act like small-business owners, and think of art as “product”— one member, for example, describes scoring a coveted licensing deal with the University of Kansas — Brainard Carey, an artist and director of the online Praxis Center for Aesthetic Studies, argues that “artists aren’t entrepreneurs.”

“If they were entrepreneurs, then as soon as something didn’t work, they’d move to something else,” Carey told me. Instead, they make art for “the weirdest reason in the world”: because they want to see it.

Carey founded the Praxis Center in 2016. Today, the online group claims 1,800 members and charges between $33 and $59 a month. With his warm voice and shaved head, and seven how-to books to his name, he’s the picture of a guru. When I took the Praxis plunge, asking for help getting grants, I got a personalized welcome video within a few hours.

The Praxis Center grew from a collective comprising Carey and his wife, Delia Bajo, also an artist. His sales pitch hinges on the duo’s participation in the Whitney Biennial of 2002 (a performance that involved washing visitors’ feet and giving them bandages and hugs). People started asking them how they got in. “Unlike what we encountered,” Carey said, “which is, you know, people holding their cards close to their chest in terms of how they made their way in the art world, we began telling them everything.”

The promotional emails come thick and fast, suggesting that you’ll ‘get the shows, residencies, and grants of your dreams.’ Does that bring the awkward tang of false promises?

Their basic method: Ask. Ask for meetings, then shows. Heck, ask for money. Go to the donor wall of a museum, Carey advises in one members-only video, and take names. In his 2011 book “Making It in the Art World,” Carey describes how he mailed cryptic packages of work samples to four Whitney Biennial organizers, which scored Praxis an interview.

If you want to set up an online store or get a Guggenheim grant, says Carey, he can help. Another draw is the weekly series of invited curators, whose emails are added to a growing list.

Karin Campbell, a curator of contemporary art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Neb., was a recent guest. A few Praxis artists have emailed her. That said, Campbell told me, conversations don’t necessarily lead to shows. For both artists and curators, “sometimes it’s just about communing.”

Pivoting to Community

Brad Troemel found success in the early 2000s as a Post-Internet artist and conceptual sculptor; now he keeps a safe distance from the art world, writing video essays critiquing culture that are delivered to his paying subscribers on Patreon, an online publishing platform.

In a 2022 video with nearly 8,000 views on YouTube, Troemel breaks down hustle culture , embodied in rise-and-grind memes about working hard. The ultimate goal, in his analysis, is “to get you to proudly embrace your own exploitation.” During the pandemic, he says, the nature of the hustle shifted from a kind of motivational sloganeering to online groups sold as “communities.” Troemel points to NFTs and meme stocks as examples. Art coaching groups often promote fellowship, too.

Even the fanciest M.F.A. program can finesse the fact that surviving the mental, spiritual and financial doldrums of a long career requires devoted friends. Netvvrk, with Paddy Johnson as its red-haired figurehead, emphasizes — well, networking.

“The art industry is messed up,” reads the Netvvrk homepage, using an expletive. “Let’s beat the system together.”

Jonathan Herbert, an artist who says he went tagging with Basquiat and now resides in Sarasota, Fla., is active in Netvvrk and Praxis Center, and speaks fondly of both. “I remember the day of finding a great grant and not wanting to tell anybody, because God knows one more person applying would really screw my chances up,” Herbert said. But Netvvrk users freely share open calls in the Opportunities section.

Herbert recalled needing a recommendation letter on short notice. Another Netvvrk member, B. Quinn, wrote him one. (When I interviewed Quinn, she shared the same story, unprompted.)

Yet even with Netvvrk, the promotional emails come thick and fast, suggesting that you’ll “get the shows, residencies, and grants of your dreams.” Does that bring the awkward tang of false promises?

“What we are trying to do is to make things easier for artists and also to set expectations appropriately,” Johnson said. Sure, members start out wanting to know how to get more shows and find galleries, she continued, but “those questions get answered naturally” as you focus on meeting people and making art.

Johnson has several part-time employees, including William Powhida , a New York artist known for critiquing art’s power structures in his drawings and writing. In his view, the group can help people “understand what the field looks like and how rare it is to achieve the kind of art world success that they might be seeing or reading about.”

Blame the Game, Not the Coach

Some of the coaching groups I explored meet a clear need for many of their members and founders — while seemingly reproducing some of the hierarchical business models (namely art schools) they’re trying to escape.

Amy Beecher, a former Netvvrk member with a Yale M.F.A., sees the uptick in artist coaches and career-development groups as a reflection of an increasingly professional approach to the creative life. There’s a “cringe factor” to this, she says.

“Are these programs inevitable at this moment in time,” she asked, “given the amount of people who’ve been through M.F.A. programs that sort of optimistically promise the myth of a career?”

NewCrits was founded in 2023 by another unsatisfied teacher, artist and Whitney Biennial alum, Ajay Kurian. The group is his alternative to teaching at Yale and Columbia (which he still does). “The first art school in America recently closed,” Kurian told me, referring to the San Francisco Art Institute. “I think there are many schools that are not far behind.”

NewCrits says it provides “time and attention to be fully seen.” It offers one-on-one online career counseling or virtual studio visits with “the world’s most visionary artists,” including Ser Serpas and EJ Hill (they were in the 2024 and 2022 Whitney Biennials, respectively), for $180 to $300 an hour. That’s a fraction of the price of an M.F.A., but also a fraction of the experience — studio time, campus life, group critiques. Kurian says he plans to roll out group options this fall.

Traditional art educators also cite the importance of community to a life in the arts. “Nothing takes the place of a real interaction with other working artists or your peers,” said David A. Ross, a former director of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and currently chair of the hybrid Art Practice M.F.A. program at the School of Visual Arts. The degree, begun 14 years ago, caters to artists with an average age of 35, many of whom have jobs and families.

He told me enrollment has been steady. “I cannot teach somebody how to make good art,” Ross said. “That has to come from inside. But you sure can help them manage a lifelong commitment to a very complicated career.”

On April 14, Johnson emailed her Netvvrk members after a “bittersweet week.” One of their own, Antonietta Grassi, had won a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Sadly, she continued, the grant is competitive — many more members were among the 94 percent of applicants who didn’t win. “And what that means, is that you should apply again this year,” Johnson wrote. “Something will break for you. I promise!”

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

At the Museum of Modern Art, the documentary photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier honors those who turn their energies to a social good .

Jenny Holzer signboards predated by a decade the news “crawl.” At the Guggenheim she is still bending the curve: Just read the art, is the message .

The artist-turned-film director Steve McQueen finds new depths in “Bass,”  an immersive environment of light and sound  in Dia Beacon keyed to Black history and “where we can go from here.”

A powerful and overdue exhibition at El Museo del Barrio links Amalia Mesa-Bains’s genre-defying installations  for the first time.

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in May .