Abstract:

Social media technologies allow individuals to express themselves online while offering unprecedented capabilities for reaching wide audiences and visibility. Very often, however, participation in such networks leads to the exhibition of private attitudes and behaviours about current topics that have the potential to create tensions between individuals’ private and professional contexts. For this reason, in the education and training of many professionals, the development of e-professionalism competence is gaining increased attention.

A key area of concern is related with the views expressed by individuals’ when they retrieve and contribute with new content, repost material found online, or share personal opinions. One sensitive area that raises particular discussion in many job contexts (e.g. healthcare, education) concerns where to draw the border with regard to the initiation or acceptance of social media connections and friend requests from customers or other related professional contacts. Another common dilemma for employees is how to deal with friend requests from superiors, as well as unanticipated consequences of workplace relationships and harassment situations that often get exposed in social media. Despite the multiple concerns that the management of individual online activity is raising in many professions, there is still a paucity of knowledge and specific framework to support individual decisions on this regards, as well as to inform the development of organizational guidelines to frame the training of new professionals. Most of the works developed are concentrated in the area of healthcare, notably in the education and training of nurses and other medical staff.

This study offers a contribution to the development of knowledge concerning e-professionalism competence, by investigating and characterizing what are key domains of employees social media utilization that might have impacts for individual and corporate performance, reputation, and overall results. The study builds on a preliminary literature review, and brings together key areas of online behaviour that have been explored, mostly in preparation of healthcare professionals, and a few other sectorial experiences, and extend the extant knowledge to other professional fields. The research work involved two empirical phases. First, the research involved the collection of data about critical incidents about the alignment of the personal and professional use of social media, focusing on professionals from business sectors with high levels of employee-customer contact. This stage allowed to extend the extant knowledge about key domains of conflict in the use of these media. In the second moment, the study builds on the identified domains of e-professionalism to develop a self-assessment scale about individual competence in the field. The proposed scale can support the development of awareness in students and young professionals while collecting empirical evidence to support the development of specific curricula elements to integrate this body of knowledge.

The study offers a relevant and timely contribution, notably for young professionals that in the transition from education contexts to the world of work often need to readjust the nature of their online behaviour. It also offers a useful tool to inform the debate and the policies about the importance of these topics in the education and training of a new generation of professionals, in the digital age.

Keywords:

E-professionalism, digital, social-media, training, competence.