Continuing Professional Development
The process of undertaking CPD
Initial assessment
Carry out an initial assessment of your current skills and knowledge. The Long Term Development Plan (form CPDF/1) will help you with this activity.
The three year plan
Determine what skills and knowledge you will need in the short term (three years) to achieve your personal goals and create your three year plan. If you are in employment include, as appropriate, any learning objectives that have been agreed with your employer.
Identify individual learning outcomes that will support these goals and decide how you will measure a successful outcome. Record these goals and measures on your three year plan, which may be either simple or detailed to meet your personal needs.
Review your three year plan annually, determine whether it is consistent with your current needs, aims and goals and amend if appropriate.
Activity planning
Identify specific activities that will enable you to achieve the desired skills and knowledge outcomes. Use the attached personal planning and activity record sheet to tabulate your desired skills and knowledge outcomes and plan the activities necessary to meet them.
Recording CPD hours
The scheme is an outcomes based scheme and it is not necessary to record hours if a member does not consider it useful. The value of recording hours is that it firstly provides an indication of the total time spent on personal development, which may raise a member's self esteem, and secondly it will help in the self assessment process.
Stage Self-Assessment
Use the personal planning and activity record sheet to record the result of the activity, assess the extent to which you achieved the desired outcome from the activity and record the hours involved. Assess in terms of the achievement percentage of the stage activity, to enable you to develop your three year assessment. Stage assessment can be undertaken by reflecting on what was planned to be achieved against what was actually achieved and can be quantified in percentage terms by considering the number of additional hours needed to complete in relation to the hours already expended.
Stage self-assessment is a subjective measure and members are encouraged to develop their own technique that they believe is useful to them. It should be remembered when carrying out self-assessment that during the course of an activity you develop a better understanding of the topic and your stage goal may be stretched, resulting in the phenomenon of never achieving 100 per cent completion of a stage goal.
Validation of CPD
Validation of CPD will be a personal requirement and it is not a requirement that records are submitted for CQI validation. Validation will vary from member to member depending on their personal requirements. The need to validate CPD will usually exist because a member wants to demonstrate their CPD to a prospective or current employer, or to provide evidence when applying for an upgrade of CQI membership or to support an application of membership to another Institution. The scheme is therefore self-validating and responsibility rests with the member to determine the extent to which they require validation.
Use the linked personal planning and activity record sheet to record your validation of the activity (eg supervisor, peer or mentor signature or attendance certificate). Attach to your personal record activity sheet for your own benefit copies of aide memoirs that you have used in your self assessment (event programme, examples of your own material, certificates, etc).
Reflection
Whether or not you validate each activity, it will usually be of benefit to reflect on what you have achieved, how you have used the new knowledge and skills and how you have improved your performance as a result. Use the attached personal planning and activity record sheet to record your reflections on how valuable the activity was to you and on how you will further use your new knowledge or skill.
Self-assessment against your three year plan
Finally, return to your three year plan and assess the extent to which you achieved the overall outcomes that you set yourself. Use your own stage assessments, your annual employment assessment (if available) and your mentor's input to help in your self-assessment.
An example plan of the above is available to provide some guidance. See the CPD Forms page. The following notes are also provided for guidance.
Use of mentors
We often find it difficult to be objective about ourselves. It is a natural instinct to be cautious in discussing personal issues. However, an objective view can be most valuable. Thus the concept of the mentor has arisen.
Typically the procedure is as follows:
- identify a person who you respect, you believe you can trust and who has typically achieved goals to which you aspire
- approach that person and ask them if they would consider being your mentor
- if they are willing, you would typically call on them for a confidential discussion about your career and planned development objectives. This may be once only, every three months or even with years between contact
- it is not necessary to use the word mentor although this is the accepted term. Your employer may help you in identifying a suitable individual
The CQI local branch network is one potential source of mentors and members should contact their local branch to see if support is available.
Working with two CPD schemes
Two columns are provided for recording the hours so that the forms can be used to record details for two different CPD schemes with differing rules, ie CQI and IRCA, IMechE or IEE. Enter the hours for the CQI scheme in 'hours 1' column and the hours or points that can be claimed against the second scheme in the 'hours 2' column. Refer to the paragraph above on recording hours and to paragraph five in the section below 'The CQI CPD Scheme'.
It must be remembered that when completing CPD for another body, the CPD criteria and rules of that body must be observed in full. If appropriate obtain permission to record CPD for the other body on the CQI forms before committing significant time to the task.
Guidance notes
- Start by conducting a SWOT analysis or audit on yourself. What have you achieved so far? What are your Strengths and Weaknesses, and what Opportunities and Threats exist outside your control that may impact upon you? If appropriate consult an experienced colleague who is capable of assessing you objectively to check the outcome of your SWOT analysis. It may also be valuable to assess your current knowledge against the CQI Body of Quality Knowledge.
- What sort of picture of your personal and work future does this present? Is it what you want? How important is your career to you? For example how much time do you want for family, friends, sport and relaxation. Think hard and honestly about these issues and set your own personal and work goals for the next three to five years. Realistically you should think about reviewing this life plan every two to three years, or more frequently if any major events in your life change your views about the future.
- Identify your current employer's organisational goals and plans for you. How will you most successfully achieve these?
- Use the SWOT, life plan and work analysis as the basis of your development goals. Work out how you can take advantage of the opportunities and neutralise the threats. Establish ways to achieve your ambitions and organisational goals. Most importantly, clarify how you will measure the successful achievement of your plans. How will you finish the statement, 'This activity was successful because ...'?