Continuing Professional Development (CPD) - Definition, Importance, Process & Example
What is Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?
Continuing Professional Development or CPD is a self-tracker of an employee to improve professionally continuously. In using continuing professional development, a person records and reviews what he or she has already learnt, how far able to apply that in real life & how to improve further. Also, how far the person has able to grab up everything that is already related to the concept learned in the training sessions. Continuing Professional Development or CPD is not a very stringent schedules program, it is just how you articulate, analyze and learn more. There is no specific method to that as in this case you become your judge.
When we talk about career tracking process, we should be aware that a person’s self -awareness and self -efficacy works a lot there. One needs to keep track of his/ her development process. Only mentors or trainers cannot just teach you that. They can teach you the concepts, especially work-related skills but that is not enough if you want to climb up high in life.
Importance of Continuing Professional Development
In this fast-growing world, where individuals are running in a rat race, everyone needs to have an edge over the other person. Some extra efforts need to be put in to run a bit ahead of your colleagues. In the business world, training sessions by a very experienced and trained consultant or faculty is obvious. They teach and train us with various skills like leadership, time management, team management etc.
But they are very much related to what we do in work, though sometimes not also. But that every employee is aware of and highly skilled in that concept or idea as it was a mass training. So how do you have an edge over the other employees? Here comes your efforts and your role in using continuing professional development. You have to track what you have learnt and how far are you able to retain and use it more widely. You cannot stick only to those training sessions for your overall growth. You have to learn beyond that. If you want switch jobs, then you need to have good networking with big industrialists and peers who can give you information that is beyond your workplace curriculum. Then you have to keep a continuous track of your CV, your aim should be to increase your CV points. This will also help in promotions in within during succession planning. This is how keeping a track of your knowledge gets you an edge over your colleagues. Thus CPD is important for the overall growth of an employee.
Continuing Professional Development Process
Continuing professional development is a reiterative and continuous process having the following steps for an employee:
1. Learn
2. Apply
3. Revise
4. Track
5. Retain
The above mentioned CPD steps have to be performed regularly and repeated at every stage of the career to grow in an organization.
Difference between Training & Development and CPD
Training and development concept of HR is usually confused with Continuing Professional Development. Yes, they may sound same but they are quite different from each other. At the base they imply the same process i.e. learning, but when you delve into the details of both the terms, they are different. Training and development is a scheduled set of trainings sessions where training of work related skills are taught and it is a one- time process. The development process is checked through some work-related evaluations which we call performance appraisal systems. Continuing Professional Development or CPD is regulated by the person himself, s/he keeps a track of what he learns and how much knowledge s/he adds on it. There is no such scheduled training sessions for that. However, both of these are important for an employee’s career development.
Example of Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
Example of continuing professional development is as discussed. If you are working in as a management trainee in an organization, the minimum training related to how to be in team, how to organize team with specific company oriented skills will be trained to you. But being at the management trainee level is not your aim, to grow ahead in life, you need to do some extra courses. You may attend seminars on various HR programs, you may write research papers if you academic type of person. You need to talk to people of different organizations, obviously not revealing the know -how of their organizations but at least to know how teams work there what new things are in use there. This is how you can review your career growth and also learn more through continuing professional development.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) along with its overview.
This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.
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