So, I was discussing CPD with my wife yesterday whilst walking the dogs. She’s an accountant, and her professional institution is really strict on CPD. They regularly throw people out for failing to ‘keep up’ with their CPD. Engineering institutions on the other hand rarely throw anyone out, and as being chartered isn’t a licence to practice, it would hardly matter if they did.
Having had the unpleasant experience of ploughing through all of the vague, ill-evidenced, PC nonsense required to obtain a formal teaching qualification (something the majority of university lecturers still avoid doing), I now know something about the theoretical underpinnings of most professional bodies’ CPD policies and have come to the view that the CPD monitoring exercises run by professional institutions are essentially easy to administer box-ticking exercises based on a half-baked misunderstanding of some questionable theories, which were developed by watching what professionals used to do before it was called CPD or formalised in any way.
You might have heard of the “CPD cycle” (though I prefer to think of it as the CPD hamster wheel). The CPD cycle is based on a mash-up of something called the Kolb Experiential Learning Cycle, plus the requirement for managers to plan the next year’s training allocation and the dreaded annual appraisal. It goes something like this:
- Identify where you are and where you need to go next
- Plan the route from here to there with management trackable objectives
- Execute the plan
- Reflect on what you learned (like you actually know what that means)
- Apply what you learned in practice
- Share what you learned in communities of practice
- Measure the overall impact your learning has had on your work
- Rinse and repeat.
The steps marked in bold come from Kolb. There are also a couple of ideas in here from other educational theorists which are at least based on some sort of empirical investigation, unlike Kolb’s, who basically just made stuff up.
The first of these is “reflection”. This word crops up a lot in CPD, but it does not mean what the CPD administrators think it means. In theory, there are many ways of ‘reflecting’ but what they all have in common is that doing it properly and formally is extremely time-consuming, though a version of it will be done without prompting, let alone coercion by the best practitioners.
For everyone else, it is a great deal easier to fake reflection than to reflect properly, and it is likely that the people assessing your reflection won’t be any better at it either. Even if you are actually reflecting though, you will still be required to conform to the approved method.
The second is the “community of practice”. Again, this is an idea based on observation (albeit sloppy “social sciences” style observation) of how newbies become acquainted with the state of the art. Engineers were one of the groups studied by the people who came up with this concept. A community of practice is a mutually supporting group of people learning how to do something better together, with those who know best at the centre.
As you advance, you get closer to the centre. Inserting this idea into the CPD cycle makes little sense, except that professional institutions often see themselves as that centre (rather than the dead wood they are all too often comprised of). They want you to share knowledge free of charge via themselves, so that they can profit from it. Again, those of us who love our profession do this unbidden, and unrewarded. The mediocrities do it on a transactional basis.
The rest of the parts of the CPD cycle are pure managerialism, a way for our lords and masters to keep tabs on us, and to create supposed measures of learning and by extension value for money from their training budgets. They do nothing whatever to foster professionalism, skill or knowledge.
I’m all for CPD and like all professionals I constantly check, research and refresh my knowledge. But my basic argument here is that the CPD cycle is not fit for purpose as a way to promote learning. It exists to allow professionals to be controlled by people who do not understand what is required to practice that profession, generating false data to promote the idea that learning, or even professional excellence can be mandated. But what does the accumulation of ‘CPD points’, a pile of ‘certificates of attendance’ and a ‘reflective’ CPD diary based on them really do to maintain standards and develop professionals?
