Conference proceeding
- Theunissen, N.C.M. (2016) Virtues for the 21th century professional. Presentation at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Character and virtues in the professions, June 2-4 2016, University of Birmingham, UK.
Abstract
Open any newspaper and you'll see that society can use more virtuous behavior. However, virtues are often considered 'old fashioned' and professionals do not relate them to their working life. Therefore, the project MijnDeugden.nl (Dutch for MyVirtues.nl) is started in 2014. The goal of this project is to refresh the classic wisdom of virtues and make them fit for our 21th century. The project builds on the well known assumption that virtues can be developed or enhanced by continued practice and have to be applied in daily life. A self- development online portal will be created, that helps individuals to reflect on their own virtuous behaviour. Key module in the portal will be a self-evaluation instrument that (1) includes virtues relevant for the current professional both in content and in language, (2) approaches virtues as a state and not a trait to promote practicing of virtues, (3) is created according to social sciences standards in questionnaire construction (4) is user-friendly to increase the motivation for long term and repeated use. To my opinion such an instrument is missing and will therefore be developed.
Keywords
Literature Study; Professional development; Questionnaire Development; Self-Evaluation; Virtues
