by Alan Nelson
The emergence of Continuing Professional Development as a serious part of professionals’ lives has been one of the key developments that have shaped the company over the last ten years.
Of course, nothing is completely new. It’s not as though professionals didn’t engage in their own development. Some of the ideas were around back in 2000, but the language was different. I remember a lot of talk of “cradle to grave lifelong learning”. If we were to prosper as a society, we were told, competing in a global market, we would all have to become knowledge workers , using our superior skills to stay ahead of competitors in lower wage developing economies.
So when did CPD start and how? The honest answer is that I don’t know. So I did what every lazy researcher does and turned to Wikipedia. I was amused to note that if you type CPD into the online encyclopedia, it comes up with a host of other expansions of the initials, nineteen of which apparently rank higher than Continuing Professional Development. So however important it may seem to me and to the people I talk to in professional bodies, we should all remember that it ranks nine lower than the Oregon based rock band, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Puts it in perspective doesn’t it? I should also say that the entry is far from comprehensive and includes this comment from the moderators:
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)
Now there’s a project a group of us should turn our minds to.
Good professionals have always strived to stay current and this has been explicitly stated by many. The British Psychological Society, for example, had the following principle in their Code of Conduct long before they established their formal CPD regime:
“Psychologists shall endeavour to maintain and develop their professional competence, to recognise and work within its limits, and to identify and ameliorate factors which restrict it.”
Often through a network of local branches, professional bodies have encouraged their members to engage in training and development. Many of our early projects focused on this sort of activity and were designed simply to extend the reach of the professional development services on offer to members.
Over the years CPD has become more clearly defined. The Professional Associations Research Network suggests the following:
“[CPD is defined as] 'any process or activity that provides added value to the capability of the professional through the increase in knowledge, skills and personal qualities necessary for the appropriate execution of professional and technical duties, often termed competence.”
For what it’s worth, I think I prefer there to be more of an emphasis on currency. This definition from The Health Professions Council works for me:
“A range of learning activities through which health professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practise safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice.”
Alongside this clearer definition of what is needed, there has been a move towards greater compulsion.
The move towards more tightly controlled and monitored CPD has been driven partly by the professional bodies. In health they are responding to adverse public reaction to high profile medical malpractice cases, and elsewhere the response is to other governance related cases such as Enron, which has been the catalyst for action in the accounting profession. This is reinforced by pressure from government for the professional bodies the get their house in order if they want to retain their regulatory role.
This move to the right of the scale created a demand for CPD resources of all kinds. What was exciting for me personally was that this world looked remarkably similar to others that I knew all about. I cut my teeth as a publisher producing textbooks for students. Students would buy good books in greater numbers than bad books. They found out whether a book was good either through peer recommendation or through a suggestion from their lecturer. But one thing was clear – they were mostly going to buy a book because they knew they needed it to get through their course.
The parallels with CPD were clear. I could see that if we could produce something good it would sell better than something bad. Good would have to be defined. It might mean any or all of: engaging, relevant, authoritative or fun, for example, but it was the existence of a CPD regime requiring professionals to complete and record their CPD that would ensure that they would buy something. It created a market.
It was to meet the demands of this market that we developed our publishing programme. We now offer our courses to a wide variety of professionals and are learning all the time about what they like and what they want. We also understand more about who is most likely to opt for online CPD:
- Judging by our sales, CPD activity is highest in regulated professions where CPD in mandatory and monitored. We have also been pleased to see that alongside the move to more regulated CPD, individuals are starting to migrate rapidly towards online offerings.
- In the UK and Ireland, two thirds of the courses are bought by women, who make up only one third of our audience. More women work part time and find it difficult to fit attendance at face to face events around other commitments.
- There is a bias in take up towards younger, newly qualified accountants, although this is not nearly as pronounced as expected.
- More courses are bought by those in practice, where a future course booking may conflict with a paid client work, whereas completion of CPD online can be fitted around other priorities.
- Finally, take-up is highest where CPD is monitored on an inputs basis – by hours or points – rather than on an outputs basis.
One of the things I like about publishing online is that you can see how people are using the courses. I never knew how someone used a book but I know exactly how they use our online courses. This means we can continually evolve our approach to meet their needs. So although more than 95% of users consistently rate our courses as good or excellent, and 98% say that the course has met their professional development needs, we continue to develop the offering to meet the needs of a CPD world that may well change over the next ten years as much as it has over the last.
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