The Process of CPD

What’s the advantage of completing a development plan as part of my CPD log?
How might I determine what my development needs are?

How many development needs should i use?

What activities can be included in my CPD Log?

How much detail should go in the description of activity section?

What should I include in the outcome and reflective evaluation section?

What’s the ‘Further Needs Identified’ section for?

How do I relate the National Occupational Standards (NOS) to my CPD Log?

• Making a plan at the beginning of your CPD year provides an opportunity for you to focus on the general direction of your professional growth.
• If you have a Personal Development plan associated with employment, this may give rise to objectives that can be linked into your CPD plan.
• Planning your CPD may help you to decide on your professional goals in a very broad sense, and enable you to plan your future goals.
• If you are new to the profession, it may also help to keep you focused on your personal aims for coming into the profession, and how you might work towards meeting those aims.
• If you have significant experience, the development plan may help you to structure both personal and business development plans.
• During the year it is possible to amend your plan in view of demands or opportunities which arise.
• Using the CPD Online Planning & Recording System enables you to keep your plans and documents online for five years, and you can download them for more long-term storage.
  

The experience of the assessors so far indicates logs with little evidence of planning tend to be less coherent and less focused and consequently of less value to the user, compared to those where some care has been put into the planning stage. The disadvantage of a more opportunistic approach, with very limited planning, is that it is more difficult to get any continuity to your development or to take full advantage of your activities from year to year if you don’t have any structure to or records of your plans.

Top of page

These may refer to your development in relation to :

• Your current job.
• Your stage of career.
• Your future goals.

Your development needs are likely to include some or all of the following:

• Learning new knowledge and skills.
• Extending those that you are already using.
• Keeping up-to date with professional issues.

You may find if helpful to start by identifying:

• Services you are currently delivering to clients.
• Demands for new services for the immediate future.
• Key areas of these services that require development.
  

The next step is to derive your own development needs from the information you have gathered.

You may find it helpful to use some of the following procedures:

• Discussion with colleagues and/or your professional adviser.
• Critical incident analysis.
• SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
• Nominal Group technique with colleagues.
• Professional Personal Development - type checklists.
• Reflecting on your job description or business plan.
  

As well as relating to your current role and career stage, your development needs can include exploring professional opportunities. For example, if you are thinking of applying for higher level posts or for applying for work from different clients, you might want to make one of your development needs ‘Investigate requirements for [x] and take steps to address relevant deficits in current skills or knowledge’.

There seems to be two common sources of confusion here:

1. Practitioners often enter the needs of their service or business, rather than
their development needs as applied psychologists.

‘Manage a psychological service’ is a service development need and may be one of your job targets, but it is not necessarily a professional development need. However, if you have not previously managed a service or you feel there may be better ways of doing it , then a professional development need might well be ‘Learn how to better manage a psychological service’. This distinction may appear trivial, but the activity recording and the reflective evaluations would be very different in these two situations. In monitoring the service development need you would be attending to the establishment of referral pathways, communication systems and other external practices and procedures. The task would be either successful or unsuccessful. In monitoring your own development need you would be attending to the ways in which you set about finding out what you needed to know, how you investigated the situation, and what important or interesting discoveries you made either about yourself or about the world you operate in professionally. Similarly, work objectives such as developing a new service, training programme, product offering etc. may generate some development needs for you. Your development needs will be about learning how to do things and so should be expressed in terms of learning rather than work objective. Whatever the outcome of the task from a service point of view, if you can reflect on the learning that you made by doing the task, then you have appropriately addressed a valid professional development need.

2. Some practitioners are entering the title of a Key Role of the National Occupational Standards as a development need rather than expressing their
actual learning need.

‘To develop, implement and maintain personal and professional standards and ethical practice’ is Key Role 1 of the NOS. You could (and should) spend your working lifetime trying to do this and as a year’s objective it is clearly too broad and non-specific to be written as a development need. We should all relate our development needs and activities undertaken to the appropriate NOS Key Role areas, rather than using the Key Role as the development need itself. Breaking the development needs down into more manageable chunks, for example, ‘Increase my Knowledge and Understanding of Working with Clients from Black and Minority Ethnic Groups’, gives a definite focus to planning how to achieve the overall goal, while not ruling out opportunistic learning about other ethical professional issues such as confidentiality in contracting with clients or combating indirect discrimination.

Top of page

It really depends on what your needs are. Generally, the assessors have reported that a satisfactory number is four to six development needs, with perhaps a few additional activities recorded under ‘Unplanned Activities’. If you have identified a large number of development needs, you may wish to prioritise them in order to consider whether they are all essential to your personal development programme for the year. Factors to take into consideration when making a priority list are likely to include their degree of importance for:

• Present work.
• Future work.
• Clients needs and demands.
• Compatibility with organisational development plans.
• Your own career aspirations.
  

Again, discussion with peers and/or colleagues can often help you to decide which needs you would like to focus on in your current CPD plan.

Problems often stem from a lack of time being spent at the planning stage.

1. Activities entered as development needs

This may lead people to enter each activity as a different development need, so that several examples of an activity are entered as separate development needs, e.g.

• Attending a meeting on supervision;
• Attending four peer-supervision sessions;
• Attending a workshop on supervision;
• Reading a book on supervision.
  

All of these could be recorded as four activities under a single development need ‘Develop further skills and knowledge in supervision’.

CPD Development Needs should be expressed in terms of learning and development rather than as an activity. Another example might be: ‘Attend a seminar on [x]’, which is a CPD activity rather than a development need. The development need might be more appropriately expressed as: ‘Update awareness of [x] and adapt practice accordingly’. Attending the seminar could well be an activity undertaken to meet that development need, but it is not the need in itself.

2. Development Needs too vague or broad.

At the other extreme, development needs may be phrased so widely that they could include virtually anything, and the activities listed under this need may have no coherence or apparent relationship with each other. An example of such excessively broad development needs is ‘Develop skills as a practitioner’, under which could be entered every workshop, seminar and supervision meeting attended, and every journal article, book and policy document read. The difficulty that arises from such "catch-all" needs is that it makes it extremely difficult for you to focus on what development has arisen and so to reflect on and learn from it for the future.

Top of page

Any professional activity counts if it has helped to maintain or improve professional competence, if it has made some contribution to the way in which you approach or carry out your professional tasks, or has helped you to think about those things in a different way.

Generally, routine activities in your job would not result in significant development, but if they do result in personal learning or enhance your professional capacity they may be perfectly valid CPD activity. Examples of this might be:

• Supervision you receive, or take part in as a peer (or even supervision of more junior staff/trainees if this results in you actually developing or learning in some way);
• Other forms of consultations with colleagues, mentors or more experienced practitioners intended to enhance your practice;
• Journal clubs, reading circles, literature searches.
  

It will be important to draw out the learning you have gained from these activities either by giving one or two specific examples, or by providing a summary overview.

It might also include activities undertaken for the first time or to update your skills, e.g.

• Prepare new teaching material on psychology (if you haven’t done this before or if you learn something significant from the activity);
• Find out how to carry out a standard professional task you’ve not done before;
• Prepare to take on the supervisory role with trainees or deepen awareness of issues in supervision through some developmental work.
  
  It would generally not include the familiar routine activities that constitute your job, e.g.
  

• Teach students about psychology when you have done this before and don’t really get anything new from it;
• Do standard parts of your practical work that you perform regularly;
• Perform important, but non-psychological, elements of your work (such as management, marketing or PR) unless these include an element of psychological application which you can reflect on and learn from.
  

It may also include occasional or regular activities whose purpose is not to achieve a specified outcome, but rather designed to foster awareness and reflection as desirable processes in their own right, e.g.

• Keep a reflective diary;
• Participate in a reflective practitioner group or action learning sets;
• Individual or team development sessions.
  

1. Confusion over the distinction between mandatory training and professional

development.

Mandatory training is by definition, a requirement of your role but may not always be linked to one of your professional development needs. CPD activities should contribute to maintaining and improving your professional competence. It is about ensuring that you are safe to practise. What you record, therefore, should relate to these aims and be a log of how you have grown and developed as an applied psychologist during the year. It is unlikely, for example, that attending a mandatory fire lecture contributes to your professional competence in a meaningful way, despite potentially being a legitimate and important activity to undertake as part of your job. However, if this results in you personally implementing some changes to working practice in your service, in order, for example, to minimise health and safety risks to clients and staff, then it could be regarded as a legitimate CPD activity, provided you explain your learning and how this has been applied to your professional practice.

2. Just listing attendance at meetings etc. as CPD activities

You may be obliged to attend many meetings, undertake many activities and read many policies. These should only form part of your CPD log if you can describe how they have contributed to your thinking, planning or conceptualising as a professional psychologist.

One of the main purposes of recording the activity is to help you organise and remember the activity to consolidate the gains you’ve made.

1. Not enough detail.

Sometimes practitioners do not provide sufficient information to fully understand the activity being described at a later date. For example:

• If you have prepared an article for publication you need to provide information about the topic covered and the journal or magazine to which you intend to submit;
• If you have done a web search, you need to specify the topic you were researching.
• If you have read books and articles, you should give the book titles and authors, or some general information about the journals or authors or topics you have been investigating;
• If you are making an entry about your supervision, it would be helpful to say how many meetings you had over the year, and whether they were face to face or by telephone, and whether you discuss your cases or have live supervision or bring tapes to the session.
  

2. Too much detail.

Sometimes practitioners have provided information that is unnecessary or even inappropriate.

For example:

• Do not put in the names of any supervisees or clients;
• There is no need to give the qualifications of your lecturers, workshop leaders or supervisors, or supply us with a full reference list of everything you have read;
• There is no need to specify the location of the events, courses or services you are describing.
  

Top of page

Some things to consider:

• Has the activity met your development objective in terms of appropriate changes in knowledge, skills, attitude and judgement?
• What have you gained from this experience?
• How will this help you in your current role?
• What benefits will it have for your clients and/or your service?
• How does it help to prepare you for a new role?
• Does this flag up any additional development that would be helpful for you to undertake?
  

We have encountered four different kinds of difficulty with the completion of this section.

1. Don’t report the publicity.

Some practitioners have simply reported the aims of the described activity as might be found on publicity material, e.g. ‘I learned to make formulations within the [x] model’. Something more personal and reflective is more helpful such as ‘I applied some of the techniques to my own clients as a way to challenge the negative thinking that has limited their performance. It was actually very difficult to get them to address emotions or self-talk, since they were unfamiliar with this and I wasn’t confident about using the methods to elicit these.

2. Don’t just give feedback of the event.

Practitioners have sometimes given evaluations of the activity, rather than evaluations of their learning, e.g. ‘Excellent course, inspiring teacher’. Something more appropriate for the present purpose would be ‘The teacher’s enthusiasm made me remember how important it is to approach the task with a positive attitude - it’s so easy to forget how far-reaching such aspects of behaviour can be’.

3. Avoid over-generalisation.

Some reflections were so broad and general that their meaning could not be determined, e.g. ‘Helped me to understand cultural issues’. A more usefully focused reflection might be ‘It was interesting thinking about different attitudes to the roles of men and women in different cultures, and how that might affect the ways in which clients from different cultural groups might react to my gender, as well as affect the kinds of interactions they might find acceptable from me’.

4. Focusing on the topic rather than your development.

Some practitioners provided highly concrete and specific learning outcomes e.g. ‘I learned that [x] is associated with [y]’. In a CPD log, the learning recorded needs to be about you and your practice more than about the world of facts and figures, and a more productive reflection of the activity might be, ‘Seeing what a difference it makes to clients when they are given a [y] explanation for their difficulties has made me wonder how best I, as a psychologist, can help them’. As well as identifying the learning you have gained from an activity, it is important to relate your learning to your professional practice. If you have not yet put the learning into practice, it would be helpful to identify how you plan to do so. If you have already put the learning into practice, it will be a case of explaining this, together with any resultant benefits for your clients, your organisation, and/or yourself.

Top of page

This helps to complete the CPD cycle by linking again with your CPD plan. Quite often, after completing a CPD activity, your reflection upon it may lead you to identify other related development that you would like to pursue, and this section enables you to record this as a reminder to yourself. Depending on your timescale, this new development need may then either be added to your CPD plan for the current year, or copied into your CPD plan for the next year.

The most common problem with this section is under use. Whilst it is not expected that every activity you undertake will lead you to identify another development need, it is likely that many practitioners will have some further needs identified from some of the activities they have undertaken. As people begin to think about their CPD as a career-long process, which may benefit from long-term as well as annual planning, we hope its usefulness will become more apparent.

Top of page

As indicated in the CPD Guidelines, psychologists are able to record their CPD based on the Key Roles of the NOS. It is possible to assign more than one role to an activity that you have undertaken, but for each Key Role you must demonstrate, in the Outcome and Reflective Evaluation section, how this relates to the activity undertaken. For further information on the NOS see the booklet CPD and NOS for Applied Psychologists (Generic).

The most common problems encountered so far are when too many Key Roles are attributed to one activity, and when the reflective evaluation does not illustrate the relevance of Key Roles identified for each activity.

Top of page