Why CPD is Important
The progression of your career typically depends on how you engage with continuing professional development opportunities.
Continuing Professional Development, or CPD, is a process that involves an individual developing professional skills and knowledge through a type of learning – whether this is interactive learning (such as online courses), participation-based (like classes or in-work training) or independent learning.
CPD enables learners to develop their professional capabilities through these learning methods.
Why is CPD Important?
CPD is important because it helps people retain a set of high-quality skills throughout their professional careers.
Many professionals have set requirements for ongoing CPD, where it is necessary for them to prove they are capable of meeting the current standards in their respective fields.
The best part of Continuing Professional Development is that it puts learners in a position where they can demonstrate new knowledge, and even progress in their career.
What are the benefits of CPD?
CPD can benefit professional learners in many ways, including:
- Refining personal skills and gaining relevant knowledge.
- Keeps academic and work-related qualifications up to date.
- Opens possible career progression pathways.
- Enhances ability to learn regularly and improve.
- Demonstrates ambitiousness, aptitude, and dedication to self-improvement.
- Provides valuable examples and scenarios for growth in CVs, cover letters, and interviews.
- Promotes independence – self-directed CPD requires that you consciously engage in learning activities and follow your own plan of study.
- Promotes self-motivation, while reminding you of your achievements and progression so far.
- Flexible learning.
Benefits of CPD for the business
Alongside benefiting the learner, CPD also benefits the business that the learner works for.
- CPD ensures that standards throughout the company and their employees are consistently high.
- It improves the efficiency and productivity of the company’s employees by giving them highly skilled, motivated staff.
- Continuing Professional Development practices also enhance the business’s reputation among customers and clients as well as potential employees.
- By giving your employees more opportunity to learn, your company can promote a healthy learning culture.
- CPD can help improve company employee retention because employees will feel valued and loyal to the company when they are given every opportunity to learn new skills and progress in their careers.
- The training offered can also provide a benchmark for annual reviews and appraisals.
- CPD will mean that the company can positively react to current trends and shifts in the industry by having employees that are ready and willing to be trained and are already up-to-date with new procedures and ways of thinking.
Continuing professional development is important because it ensures that your employees will continue to be competent in their work.
It will always be an ongoing process and it typically continues throughout a professional’s career, but by offering the chance for your employees to learn, you’re essentially telling them that they have a future with the company.
That stability is needed in today’s world of work, where more people than ever are finding themselves jobless.
Well-crafted Continuing Professional Development is crucial because it delivers benefits to the individual, their profession, the company, and the public – all at the same time.
The importance of CPD should not be underestimated – it is a career-long obligation for practicing professionals and can give an individual a range of skills which are suitable for a variety of careers.
It’s prudent that an individual being trained remembers that skills are transferable, and that by learning these skills with one company, they are not making it so they are stuck there. Rather, CPD ensures that an individual shouldn’t find themselves without work for long, if they do decide to move on.
CPD should be engaging and fun, more so than anything else.
