Another brick in the wall.

Sitting at the back of one of those events that professional institutes put on to encourage their members to undertake “CeePeeDee” I noticed that my notebook was covered in irritated words, decorated and surrounded by forceful boxes and circles. I had inadvertently been scribbling my irritation at this person in front of us delivering another blatant sales pitch to us under the guise of our damnable “Continuing Professional Development” obligation.

After the event, still seething slightly in the weekend traffic, my thoughts - as so often before - turned to the whole nonsense of Continuing Professional Development. CPD (a despicable, devalued abbreviation) was foisted on the majority of us in the 1990s. It was seen as a “professional” response to the climate of suspicion beginning to surround other professions, a climate of suspicion fed by some well publicised disasters.

Time and again the finding of enquiries had been that many professionals were sadly out of date in their knowledge and practices. They were still clinging to the idea that, having once qualified in 1952, they never needed to learn anything ever again. Yes, they were horribly wrong, and they had to learn to change. The solution was thought to be to impose on them a requirement to “keep learning”. That, it was felt, would keep them up-to-date and improve practices. Formalised CPD was born.

Except that from the outset it didn’t impose this requirement for learning. It imposed a requirement to attend events, keep a record, meet a target. So it is that ever since, as the canker of “CPD” has infested more and more sectors, the mind boggling pointless absurdity of mandatory recording has been the driving force. CPD for many is now built on the stupidest set of stupid premises ever devised, primarily that if an institute asks to see a member’s “CPD” record, it won’t show “compliance”. Of course it will!

But far more stupid is the basic failure to understand the nature of our profession. If a surgeon fails to “do CPD”, they can be prevented from working. If a company accountant doesn’t “do CPD” the company may be wise to sack them in case they may break one of the ever-evolving regulations. But if a trainer doesn’t “do CPD”? What’s the external sanction?

There isn’t one. CPD “regulation” for most of us is a chimera, a paper tiger, a nonsense. The institutes rely on their members knuckling under. But if they all stopped doing it, the CPD recording requirements would be diluted, reduced or removed. Would they shut down their profitable membership income? Would they ‘eckerslike. So there are no real sanctions, except against a few individuals annually ( “pour encourager les autres”) who may have no real objection to leaving and saving their subscription. The capable and experienced practitioner outside the institute is as free to practice as the member, and always will be. That’s why there are hundreds of thousands of practicing trainers and managers in the UK, but all institutes’ membership, in total, is a mere fraction of that number.

The key is that “soft” skills like training and much of management are largely self-sharpening tools. They get better by being used. People in these professions tend to be Creatives, and every thing a Creative does is also their learning. It isn’t necessary to externally structure their learning, to demand it, to confine it to a format. These processes can actually undermine the learning itself, take the excitement away, reduce innovation and improvement. They are the bricks in the wall.

The Creatives’ professional development is not unrecorded. It is there, in the sketchbook of their life. They are constantly recording ideas, revisiting earlier experiments, trying something different, adapting their practice, producing sketches and maquettes, showing these to customers, evaluating their potential.
So they get better, more skilled, more confident, with every task they do, and people pay for what they do. The market is never stupid. They don’t get better by scrabbling maniacally once a year through their diaries and recording the subject, medium, duration and purpose of each competed task. Their learning is continuous, their professional development intrinsic to the career they have chosen. Real learning, the stuff that matters, isn’t something that an institute can specify, classify, stipulate or regulate. Their members don’t need to be threatened with institutional blackballing to go on learning.

Nor do they gain a thing from a sales pitch in an hotel room on a Saturday morning, when they would usually be walking the dog, and doing something really useful, like thinking. Or even dreaming.