2008 Professional Development

At the end of last year I completed my Diploma in Training and Assessment (TAA05). It was a mommoth task and it highlighted to me the importance of maintaining on-going records for professional development purposes.
I started to realise that continuous professional development (CPD) is a question of setting yourself objectives for development and then charting your progress towards achieving them. It's about where you want to be, and how you plan to get there. I needed to reflect and focus on outcomes and results, rather than on how many courses I had attended.
I started to capture useful experiences and had to assess the practical benefits of what I had learned. I had to think about - what can I do now that you couldn’t do before? It’s so much about what I did, but how I can use what I learnt
As a learning and development professional I think that it is critical to have a responsibility to keep your skills and knowledge up to date. It makes you more accountable and ensures that the advice that you are giving out is from the standpoint of current knowledge.
I think that going through this reflective process is an investment in yourself. It’s a way of planning your development that links learning directly to practice. CPD ensures that you keep your skills up to date, and prepares you for greater responsibilities.
I believe that it definitely strengthens your professional credibility and helps you become more creative in tackling new challenges that are bound to crop up in 2008!