Interactive CPD Toolkit

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) toolkit

A Step-by-Step Guide to progress your career and record your Continuing Professional Development (CPD). To help with your career progression and achieving your goals, jobs.ac.uk has produced a free interactive electronic toolkit on CPD, giving you a structured and step-by-step approach to your professional development.

This interactive CPD toolkit will help you:

• Assess and understand your current situation
• Document, track, and review your skills and achievements so it’s easier to keep your CV updated
• Set up and accomplish short-term objectives and achieve your longer-term career goals

🡻 Download the Full Interactive CPD toolkit 

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a recognised, systematic way of tracking your professional development on an ongoing basis. It also helps you to document and reflect on any learning or training that you either undertake formally or acquire informally.

There are 5 aspects to CPD:

1. Recording: You need to record the steps in your development as a professional, including training events and informal learning. Development is not necessarily about the ‘core’ content of your profession, as doing your job will require other skills and abilities such as communication or information management.
   These are often the skills you acquire in the course of your work, which help you to do your job and build your overall capability.
2. Reflecting: The very activity of writing something down will help you to think about it. Reflecting on events and experiences helps you to integrate the learning and see how you may be able to use it in other situations.
3. Tracking: If you have recorded your learning, you can see how you are progressing and developing and where the gaps in your capabilities are. Then you can set the direction and objectives for future learning and training.
4. Planning: Planning is taking the next step towards your objective and about making the direction more concrete. If you see a gap in your abilities, you can plan your next move, whether it is shadowing someone with more experience, going on a training course or just talking about it to other people.
5. Reviewing: Systematically reviewing your development objectives helps you to measure your progress and demonstrates that you have achieved your goals.

Completing the forms in the CPD toolkit

Various forms are available to download throughout this toolkit. This is the start of your CPD portfolio, which, if you keep using, will build into a useful career resource.

Job-specific skills and knowledge

These are the core skills and knowledge that are directly related to your job.

Examples include:
• analysing data
• lecturing/teaching
• specialist topic knowledge

If you don’t have a job specification to work from, think of what you do every day in your job and write down the knowledge and skills relating to each activity.

Capabilities

Capabilities or competencies are different from specific skills as they are not so focused and have more to do with what you are like.

You may or may not use them in your current job. Your capabilities are always transferable to other situations as they are generic.

Examples include:
• influencing and persuading people
• attention to detail
• initiating ideas

Transferable skills used for CPD

These are skills you have that are transferable to other jobs. Some of them will come from your job-specific skills list and others from previous jobs or outside interests. Ask yourself whether you could use them in another job.

Examples include:
• presenting ideas formally
• organising events
• managing a budget

Work Values

Your values have an impact on what you do. If your values are not compatible with the job you do, you may not be happy in your work.

Examples include:
• no commercial imperatives
• seeing results and making a difference
• security

Interests

This is a list of areas that genuinely interest you and that you enjoy both in and outside of work, and many may include specific hobbies.

Examples include:
• your subject area
• helping people learn
• researching and writing

‘Where am I now?’ Form

Goals, objectives and action plans

The two forms in this section will help you to set development objectives and plan actions to achieve them.

• The first form is a Statement of Intent, which will help you to record a general statement of intent, documenting your longer-term goals and, initially, three areas for development.
• The second form, Objectives and Action Plan, is about setting development objectives and formulating action plans in the shorter term, starting from now.

How to use the “Statement of Intent” form

1. Long-term goal(s): These are goals that you are aiming to achieve in the long-term – in three, five or even ten years. This need not be very precise, as you may change it as you go along. You may also be happy to leave the future open-ended and not have a longer-term goal at all. However, it does help if you have some idea of where you are going so that it provides a framework for your overall development.
2. Strengths: Make a note of three areas or activities in which you feel at your best and most comfortable.
3. Weaknesses: Make a note of areas that you feel need further development.
4. Areas for development: From your areas of strengths and weaknesses, make a note of no more than three areas that you would like to develop. These can either be strengths that you want to build on or weaknesses that you want to strengthen. You can then turn these into clear objectives, one by one, on the next form.

Statement of Intent Form (Download)

The Objectives and Action Plan form is about setting development objectives and formulating action plans in the shorter term, starting from now.

How to use the “Objectives and Action Plans” form:

Don’t set yourself more than three development objectives at one time – you won’t be able to achieve them. Building on the three areas for development you identified in the last part of this section, you can clarify your objectives. Use one form for each objective.

Setting Development Objectives

Your development objectives are short- to medium-term and focus on particular areas for development.

A development objective needs to be precise. It’s more than just a statement of intent; it’s a clear and focused goal. Every objective needs to be SMART:

• Specific – exactly what you want to be able to do
• Measurable – exactly what you will be able to do or do better
  when you have achieved it
• Achievable – based on your capability and the constraints
  of your situation
• Realistic – based on the constraints of your work, time
  and commitments
• Time-bound – with a firm date for achieving it

Action planning also has to be specific, realistic and time-bound. You need to:

• Start with your SMART development objective
• Identify your overall strategy and the learning methods you think would be appropriate. For example, go on a training course, shadow a colleague, etc.
• Plan the first step (for example, speaking to your line manager), and plan to do it as soon as possible
• Decide on a review date for the plan. This may be the same as your development objective review date.

Objective and Action Plan Form

Put it in your diary and do it, even if you haven’t reached the objective – you may need to revise your plan. You also need to make a note of the resources (people, money, training) you need to be able to put your plan into action.

The learning experience can begin from any of the four stages.

Different people are happier with different stages of the cycle (this is your preferred learning style), and circumstances also dictate the stage that learning starts from.

It makes no difference to the outcome of the learning, as long as all stages are given equal weight.

No one stage on its own makes a whole learning experience.

All the stages are important, and each leads onto the next. When we learn as we go along, we often miss out the ‘reflecting’ stage in our dash to get on to the next thing.

The Informal Learning Log helps you to do this as you note down your experiences. Some examples of informal learning activities include:

Informal learning activities at work
• Job shadowing
• Job swapping/job rotation
• Coaching and mentoring
• ‘Buddying’, peer-coaching, ‘Sitting with Nellie’
Sources of informal learning
• Learning from successes
• Learning from mistakes
• Learning from other people
• Learning from feedback

Learning from feedback

Feedback on what you do, how you do it and how it is experienced is the single most effective tool for learning, and is part of every informal learning experience. However, despite this – and despite the amount of potential feedback there is – we often shy away from it.

Top tips for receiving feedback

1. Ask for it! If you ask, you’re prepared, and you won’t be caught off-guard
2. Listen carefully to what is being said
3. Let the person finish and don’t interrupt – you may miss some praise!
4. Don’t rush to justify your actions
5. Ask questions to clarify anything you don’t understand
6. Ask for suggestions on how you could have done better
7. Listen for the good as well as the bad
8. Think about it – and get other people’s feedback
9. Remember that it’s up to you whether or not you take action as a result

Formal Learning Log Form

How to use the “Formal Achievements Record”

• Situation: make a note of the situation you were initially faced with
• Task: identify what you had to do
• Action: describe the action you took
• Result: describe the result of your action

Formal Achievements Record Form Form

Discover more related articles on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) with jobs.ac.uk:

• How and Why CPD courses can help you
• How Continuing Professional Development (CPD) can motivate your career
• Different types of CPD courses in academia

Melanie Allen – CPD Toolkit Author:

Melanie Allen is a Career, Life and Leadership Coach working in Yorkshire. She brings over 20 years of writing and developing Career Development, Leadership and Coaching training, several publications and plenty of life experience to her work. She completed her Diploma in Advanced Executive Coaching from
the Academy of Executive Coaching in 2003. Since then, she has established her coaching business, working with organisational and private clients both face to face and over the phone.

Share this article