7 tips to master your Continuous Professional Development Plan
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a very handy tool we all can (and should!) use to manage own our ongoing development. It refers to the process of tracking and documenting the skills, knowledge and experience that you have gained, you are currently gaining or want to gain after your initial training.
Here are 7 quick tips that can help you make the most of your CPD:
1- Follow the CPD process:
2- Self-reflection: There many different ways of doing an structured and productive exercise of reflection, find the one that works best for you. Here are some examples:
- John’s Structured Reflection (2000) https://goo.gl/tuCs6w
- Gibbs’ Reflective Model (1988) https://goo.gl/CUodSO
- Kolb’s Reflective Obeservation (1984) https://goo.gl/ceSHkL
3- Feedback is golden, and also a great opportunity to learn and improve. Be proactive and try to get (both formal and informal) feedback from your colleagues and friends. Ask for honesty, prepare yourself to hear both positive and negative insights and reflect on what has been said.
4- Think big and small: Try to include both large and long-term objectives like overall career goals, and more specific and achievable short-term objectives, like training courses, events you want to attend, etc.
5- Keep it nice & short: I’d say that 3 to 5 goals (SMART ones, please!) are more than enough. Just make sure they are relevant, achievable and that they list specific steps to achieve them!
6- Review your progress regularly: Yeah, yeah… I know life always gets in the way but remember this exercise is for you and for your future so make sure you give your CPD plan the importance it has! Set reminders on your calendar, review your progress regularly and adjust goals if necessary!
7- Document the process: It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, a simple spread sheet will do. Just make sure you include, at least, the following fields:
I hope you found this little post useful! It was great for me to write it as I think this is a very simple yet powerful tool and I would encourage everyone to do their very own CPD.
If you feel that they are too time consuming you could talk to your manager and discuss whether there’s a possibility to make them a part of your performance appraisal (no double work that way! :) )
Here are some very interesting academic papers on this topic:
- An electronic learning portfolio for reflective continuing professional development https://goo.gl/qw4W6P
- Continuing Professional Development: Best Practices https://goo.gl/r29Fye
- Evaluating the Impact of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) https://goo.gl/M7nZjM
