Compulsory Professional Development, or CPD, is the ongoing process of developing, maintaining, and documenting your professional skills.

Once you graduate and you start your career as a professional, the learning should continue steadily to enable you to learn new skills and get better at what you do.

Throughout your career it should be important to stay on top of new trends and new developments in your professional field in order to have the necessary knowledge.

The abbreviation, CPD, stands for two forms of professional development: continuing and compulsory.

In some jobs like pilots, doctors, nurses, real estate agents you have compulsory professional development because in those fields you need to complete mandatory CPD requirements in order to maintain their registration.

For other jobs, CPD is made on a voluntary basis and is therefore seen as continuing professional development.

This mechanism is very important since it’s the only process that maintains high standards of professional practice and the relevance and currency of qualifications and experience.

Professional development is important both for employees and employers.

For an employer, having up-to-date, informed, and efficient members of the business is very important to guarantee the success of the organisation.

For an employee, the role of CPD is to keep enhancing and extending knowledge and expertise which can bring value professionally as well as personally.

Continuing professional development enables you to keep-up-to-date with technical developments in your area, extend your knowledge in other fields, perfect existing skills, acquire new skills, apply your learning and accumulate experience.

CPD is an investment because it costs money and time for both employers and employees.

It can also be seen as an investment in your career since the goal is the develop more competencies in your field. Since CPD can bring to employers and employees, it’s usually standard to share costs between both parties.

The more the CPD training will bring to the employer, the most likely the investment.

In order to get the most out of your CPD investment, you need to be able to think about your return on investment (ROI).

You can consider the following points to get your ROI:

Learning outcomes

Relevance of the training compared to the current role

Benefit of the employer when achieving the training

Benefit of others when achieving the training

Long term benefit

A lot of different training are possible when considering compulsory and continuing professional development.

You can usually choose between formal, informal, and external CPD activities.

Formal training is usually closely related to your field. We categorise in formal CPD, things like tertiary study with accredited and non-accredited courses, conferences, seminars, research, writing papers, holding presentations, mentoring or dedicated education.

When CPD is informal it’s usually training that is not designed specifically as a CPD but still contributes to a work-related development.

Types of informal CPD can be conversations with colleagues, exchange of information at meetings, dedicated committees, internet research, activities within a professional association.

External CPD extends even further the types of activities that contribute to your professional development.

External training can be things like volunteering, participate in a committee, club, or service, learning new skills unrelated to your work and personal development.

With external training you can train or various new skills that can make you a better professional: learn social skills, management skills, leadership skills, learn a new language, learn a new sport.

To have a consistent approach with your CPD, it’s best to have a methodology that you can use throughout your career.

The circular process by SkillsYouNeed is a good framework to map your CPD efforts.

The process moves from identifying your development needs through planning and then carrying out your learning activities, to reflecting on your learning, and then applying it and sharing it with others.

In this process you have to start by identifying your needs for training.

These needs can be identified by the day-to-day activities linked to your activity, the needs of your managers, feedback from colleagues or personal interests that can be linked to your job.

If your needs are clear, then you need to plan your CPD activities.

When planning your activities, you need to be aware of the different types of training available.

When planning CPD you need to be aware that the training can take some time and be expensive.

Once you have done your training, take some time to reflect on what you have learned. In reflecting about your activities during the CPD, you will be able to identify the most important part of the training.

At the end of each training you need to be aware of how it will change what you do in future to change the way you work.

Once you have properly reflected on those learnings, you can apply what you have learned which can be a difficult process.

When coming out of a training you will need to move through the different stages of learning which begin at unconscious incompetence to move through unconscious competence.

When you reach unconscious competence, you are able to do something almost instinctively, without needing to focus on it, which is when you truly integrate a new skill.

The last step of the process is to be able to teach to others this knowledge.

When you are able to share and teach people about a topic, it means that you have fully internalised it.

Sharing this new knowledge amongst colleagues in your organisation can make your teams stronger and healthier.

Nowadays everyone with internet access and some knowledge can access online courses from the best universities worldwide.

This is possible thanks to the development of online training and online CPD. The increase in sign-ups for online courses worldwide is good proof that more people wish to access training when they want and from where they want.

This is one of the advantages of online CPD: remote access.

No matter your location, teachers and students can connect through recorded webinars and dedicated learning platforms.

Transitioning online for your CPD is also cheaper for your organisation since you don’t need to plan the costs for travel, accommodation, food and other expenses.

Everyone can start producing online content thanks to cameras on mobile phones, laptops and cheap webcams.

Free or low-cost webinar providers make it also easier than ever to organise CPD’s online.

Your online training can be broadcasted to a worldwide audience in an instant.

More than ever, you can reach people from different countries, different cultures and different fields easily.

Dedicated online learning platforms make it easy to communicate in forums with other students.