There is a high correlation between employees undertaking CPD, and feeling committed to their job. This is especially due to new circumstances brought about by COVID. It is crucial for people to be trained in the new skills that their evolving industry requires.
Despite this, some learners find it difficult to feel engaged enough to undertake CPD in the first place. It can feel like a mere box-ticking exercise, a tedious formality, an activity they do just so their organisation can kill time and say they dedicated a day to the development of their staff. The following article will explain 4 reasons why CPD is so important. We hope that Heads of CPD can use it as a resource to explain to learners the benefits of CPD.
What is CPD?
Continuing Professional Development (CPD), is the systematic process of developing a professional’s competence and innovation. They must learn these skills through learning and development activities such as webinars, workshops, readings and podcasts.
But why does this practice make CPD so important to employees and organisations? Why do employees feel more committed to their job when their CPD is being monitored and improved on?
Without further ado, below are 4 reasons for the importance of CPD.
1. Builds Employee Confidence and Engagement
Your employees or association members, even those that typically know the importance of CPD, have probably been away from the workplace for the past 16 months. Any training they have undertaken might have been just something they did from home to kill time during lockdown, or webinars sent to them so they could feel productive by viewing them at home.
Undertaking formal CPD activities in 2021 might feel daunting after such a long period of isolation. Employees might feel unfamiliar with certain elements of their work, and concerned about failing their training, especially considering the rise in redundancies that we have COVID-19 to thank for.
But this fearfulness is exactly why offering CPD is so important for your internal stakeholders. CPD is proved to build learners’ confidence, as it gives them the knowledge and skills to feel more secure in their role. It may be daunting at first, but this is all the more reason to assist their professional journey with CPD.
Make it clear to them that your CPD programme is not just about training them in box-ticking objectives that suit your organisation. Survey them to ensure that your CPD activities work towards their individual developmental needs. Confidence will come from them seeing that the activities they are doing will help them develop as workers and people, not just help their managers look good.
This confidence gained from CPD will also encourage them to feel more engaged in your organisation’s activities, as they will view themselves as valued, more highly accredited, members of your industry.
2. Incentivised Rewards for Improvements in Knowledge
Another way to incentivise employees to work towards CPD is to offer rewards for improvements in their competency or knowledge.
Customers speaking to employees expect them to be experts in whichever field your company operates in. They will be most satisfied with experiences with your company, and leave good feedback, if the member of staff that they talk to has all the information they need to hand. Therefore, CPD can directly improve the ease of experiences between customers and employees. This is why CPD is so important. It makes life easier for the both of them and results in praise for your employees. This is shown by the finding that there is a 16% increase in customer satisfaction for companies that use learning technology.
Therefore, through an easy process of ensuring that customer satisfaction is rewarded with promotions or certifications, you can show employees that CPD is directly beneficial for their careers. The ability to make employees feel truly valued clearly demonstrates why CPD is important.
3. Visible Rewards via Accreditations
Such certifications mentioned in the previous point could include up-to-date accreditations. These accreditations are extremely useful for their ability to be used as points of interest on CVs. They could also use them as badges on their LinkedIn profiles.
Other accreditations could include those directly achieved through completing CPD courses or achieving a certain amount of CPD points. These can make employees feel more well-rounded, widening their options if they want to alter their career path to work in a different area of the business. If you provide CPD courses with transferable skills, and make it clear that your company allows opportunities for flexible career paths and job security, your employees will be much more motivated to undertake CPD for their long-term goals.
4. Promotes a Healthy Company Culture
Last year, the world stopped, and many companies had to be put on pause. Your employees might still be feeling somewhat stagnant, as they have had to work long hours at home towards the goals of an office that they could not even enter.
CPD courses can be a great way of giving employees fresh and exciting targets to work towards. They can promote a culture of learning and development, where no two days are the same. Encourage employees to take advantage of opportunities to utilise the new skills and knowledge they have learnt. These should help them feel – and be – accomplished and valued members of your team.
Group CPD activities, such as in seminars, can also encourage teamwork between employees. It can also provide opportunities for people from different ranks to support and share knowledge with each other. This can contribute to the dynamic company culture by also promoting teamwork.
If you have managed to display to your employees why CPD is important, and your next step is to host a CPD event for them, you should be getting in contact with CPD Online. Tell us about your next CPD event on our contact form.
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