Continuing Professional Development in the PMO

What does Continuing Professional Development (CPD) mean?

Here’s the official line from the CPD Standards Office:

Continuing professional development (CPD) is the intentional maintenance and development of the knowledge and skills needed to perform in a professional context. This could mean honing current skills, it could mean developing them to a new level, or it could mean learning new ones that will allow an employee’s job role to expand or prepare them for potential promotion.

In regulated industries such as nursing, legal or accountancy it can mean that professionals lose their licence to practice if they don’t maintain their CPD.

In project management, which is not regulated, CPD exists to predominantly maintain a certain level of membership to an association or professional body, like the Project Management Institute (PMI).

PMI call their CPDs, Professional Development Units, or PDUs. To maintain their certification level of PMP, you need to be a member plus carry out 30 hours worth of PDUs over three years. In reality that can be a formal training course of four days in duration – just one course in three years!

But Continuing Professional Development is not just about maintaining membership – a point collecting exercise, it’s about continuing your development to maintain your status as a professional in the field you have chosen to work in. It should be thought about as Lifelong Learning. Hopefully, we’re learning something new every day, week and month – however, thinking about CPD makes us actively seek out learning opportunities rather than just leaving it to chance.

It’s about taking an active interest in the work we do and understanding that the work we do changes – after all, we’re in the business of supporting change so you would think we’d have a head start in knowing that there will be new things on the horizon that we should know about.

CPD is not just about training courses – and it’s also not all about spending money which you don’t have. There are a number of different activities and routes you can take.

PMO Learning’s Eileen and Lindsay have done bucket loads of CPD over the years – and we’ve heard of more bucket loads from PMO practitioners we’ve met over the years too.

We’re going to be discussing the different options you have in your PMO career with CPD and some of it might surprise you.

Why not join us on Monday 24th February at 12 noon UK time for our webinar and leave with a bucket load of your own ideas in pursuing your next CPD activity.

> Register today

 

 

 

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