CPD stands for ‘Continuing Professional Development’. This is defined as any type of in-house training or learning experience to increase our knowledge, skills, and behaviour on a specific subject area or role. This process is ongoing and is aimed at achieving long-term improvements in our professional practice. But why is it important?
Firstly, CPD is essential as it helps keep our skillset and knowledge up to date. This arises opportunities where we can build on our strengths, as well as developing ourselves where we have capability gaps. For example, work shadowing or in-service training where we learn directly from other professionals or experts in using new protocols to operate new medical equipment. As a result, this will help us become more qualified to help others and to provide the highest quality of service delivery. With brand new learning experiences, we can support the wider business.
Secondly, it is important to remember that CPD is not just used to gain new knowledge and skills but also to maintain these as we go along our career journey. For example, competency trainings such as annual CPR and/or first aid training ensure that our knowledge is up to date and refreshed and give staff confidence and the ability to react immediately to an accident, injury, or illness. Many lives can be saved if first aid and CPR are administered early. In a nutshell, competency-based learning is a great form of CPD as it encourages us to navigate both our personal and professional lives with ease when dealing with real life challenges and situations.
Thirdly, CPD helps boost employee morale and increases productivity by developing the areas to improve. With activities such as reflective practice or peer reviews, we become more confident to take on greater responsibilities and communicate openly with others. For example, through peer review and reflective practice, health and social care professionals can create stronger multidisciplinary teams to make better use of their resources, improve social care commissioning processes, as well as the clinical decisions that need to be made. With meaningful assessment and feedback on one another, it drives the organisation to foster continuous personal and professional development, and a foundation of trust.
Other reasons why CPD is valuable are that it enables us to make better decisions, to become more creative in tackling new challenges, and to cope positively with change in the workplace. For example, COVID introduced a new form of working from home. This new trend at the time embraced various pieces of software and technology to adjust to this unexpected change. Keeping up to dates with these changing trends help us decide what works best for the organisation. Thus, by taking part in CPD such as courses or research on how technology now can benefit service users or clients better, we can stay up to speed with all the different changes involving technology and everything else in our industry. In my healthcare profession, technology is continually being introduced, changed, and created, to improve people’s health. Whether it’s in the form of a brand new scanner to detect organ function or a specialised radiology system to access patient information and imaging data, they are useful for me so I can uphold my responsibility to protect my patients undergoing medical exposure with radiation.
Lastly, CPD helps us take our career further. With the self-directed activity, i.e. keeping a file of our progress, it allows us to reflect, review and document our learning and to identify any learning gaps we need to bridge with required professional knowledge and skills. This also serves as a reminder of how we’ve progressed and shows credible evidence for professional recognition, especially when CPD audits are conducted to determine if we are complying with CPD requirements.
Overall, CPD takes place in many forms and every activity under CPD plays a big role in defining who we are and who we want to be in life by proactively learning and developing our best selves.
