21.10.2024
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DHA Transport's Leon Shrewbury, who joined DHA in August 2024, provides a useful insight into Continued Professional Development and why it's important and what actually counts as CPD in the planning and transport industry.
What is CPD?
Continuing Professional Development, or CPD for short – because planners love a good acronym – is something that can quickly get forgotten about after the first few youthful years in an industry, but it is something that can stay with you, helping both you, your career, and your business to grow.
According to two of the professional organisations that I hold membership with (Transport Planning Society [TPS] and Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport [CILT]), Continuing Professional Development can roughly be defined as:
“The systematic maintenance, development and improvement of knowledge, skills and competence throughout a professional’s working life.”
Why is CPD important?
In the current economic climate, you could be forgiven for forsaking CPD and thinking that fee-earning activity should be prioritised to maximise profits. I’m not going to suggest that you shouldn’t do this but want to just remind you of the importance and value that CPD can bring to both yourself as an individual, but for your team and business, which will ultimately end up ‘paying you’ in other ways as your career grows, and ultimately benefit you and your employer alike.
What counts as CPD?
So, as a planner (but you could swap in any profession in most cases), what counts as CPD, and what is the point?
1 – Keeping abreast of the latest developments in your industry: The field of planning is always evolving with new technologies, environmental concerns, changes in regulations and changes to policy (and governments). With the latter, this is of particular importance to planners with changes to legislation impacting upon the legal requirements associated with developments;
2 – Enhancing skills and knowledge: Attaining new skills or deepening existing knowledge, not only keeps an individual motivated and engaged in their profession but can also bring new techniques into the team, to create new ways of working or find improvements to it. This is particularly topical to planners now, with sustainability requirements necessitating new techniques and understanding of topics such as, for example, decarbonisation and net zero targets, and Biomass Net Gain;
3 – Career advancement: To achieve professional chartership (and maintaining it) with most professional bodies, there is often an expectation to demonstrate continuing commitment to CPD. By showing a desire to continue to learn and progress your career, it can also demonstrate to decision makers in your company that you want to take the next step up the career ladder; and
4 – Network and Collaboration: Attending events such as conferences, forums, webinars and industry awards allows individuals to showcase their talents to the wider industry community, which not only sells their capabilities, but is also an excellent marketing opportunity for the company they represent. Sharing ideas and collaborating with peers can help shape new ways of thinking, which brings a benefit to the industry as a whole.
From my own career experiences where I have worked in large, medium, and small sized consultancies, they have all offered CPD opportunities through attending external events or taking opportunities to learn new skills on courses. However, I have found that the most valuable CPD has come from a devoted team of mentors who are willing to take the time to progress others in the team and through the internal knowledge sharing sessions. Gaining an insight not only to what other individuals and parts of the business are working on, but by learning this, you are then able to talk more confidently and cross-sell business services when out and about at networking events and conferences, which is great for business… and your CPD!
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