Emma Grover, Professional Development Lead at RCOT, talks about the ways we can better record our continued professional development.
Emma Grover, Professional Development Lead at RCOT.
I’m Professional Development Lead at RCOT. I’m really passionate about changing the narrative that CPD is something we have to do and moving us to a place of doing CPD because we want to. After all, CPD isn’t just for the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) audit, but represents our continuous learning, development, growth, and progression which is happening every day, and in ways we perhaps don’t recognise or capture.
It’s the start of 2023, so now’s as good a time as any for us to stop and take stock of our current CPD habits and think about how to approach our CPD in the coming months.
We know we must regularly engage in and record our CPD activities to evidence that we are meeting HCPC’s CPD standards. We also know we should be prepared to submit a CPD profile if we’re randomly selected for audit as part of the two-year re-registration cycle. But be honest, how does the thought of being called for audit make you feel?
So many of us have good intentions when it comes to embedding good CPD habits into our working lives. But busy schedules and not-enough-hours-in-the-day can get in the way. Before we know it, a few months have gone by, and we realise we haven’t been regularly recording the learning from the CPD we’ve been doing. CPD starts to become less overwhelming once we realise how much of what we already do counts as CPD. But how often do we take a moment to think about the CPD we are already doing as part of our everyday? HCPC’s Registration Manager Natalie Berrie’s recent blog on carrying out and recording CPD in challenging times talks about this more, as well as the concept of recording little and often.
Remembering why we do CPD, as well as engaging in CPD activities that we feel genuinely interested in can optimise what we get out of CPD. We know that reflection is an essential part of learning; it’s a powerful tool which requires us to pause and think about how a scenario, conversation or situation made us feel. What went well? What did we learn from this? How will we apply this to our practice, and what difference might this make to the people we work with? So, if podcasts are your thing, why not listen to this episode by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) which discusses the power of reflection. The podcast will get you thinking about how reflection is what leads to behavioural change; by reflecting soon after an event, you’re more likely to remember new knowledge and apply this to practice, benefiting your professional activities and your service users. The episode also explores the importance of reflective conversations in supervision; the responsibility to reflect does not sit solely with the learner, their supervisor has a vital role to play in this by asking questions and supporting a person to grasp and apply new learning.
Top tip: Consider how both the blog and the podcast we've mentioned could count towards your CPD! You can use our CPD reflection tool to capture your thoughts and record what you plan to do differently around your approach to CPD from now onwards.
More tips on how to make CPD part of your everyday include:
- Make it sociable – do CPD with peers
- Multi-task – listen to a podcast between community visits, or when walking the dog
- Save time – reflecting soon after an event will make it easier to record accurate information
- Be creative – try using mind maps or drawing your thoughts and reflections
- Use technology – think about the technology can you use to support you to record your CPD; this could be anything from taking a picture of handwritten notes, to using voice notes or videos as a way of recording evidence of the learning that’s taken place and actions you plan to take to apply learning to practice.
Finally, we want you to know that we're investigating how we create and move to an online platform which will support you with recording your CPD. We’d love to hear what you think of the current RCOT reflection templates as part of this project, and your top tips for finding time for CPD. You can let us know by contacting prof.dev@rcot.co.uk.