9 Benefits of Continuous Professional Development.

We walk through the benefits of continuous professional development and how it can support career growth.

Starting a career once you’ve met the academic (or clinical standards) doesn’t mean that further learning must end.

Continuous professional development is an important step for professionals looking to further their career, progress their skills and continue to be challenged in their role.

In this blog, we’ll go through:

• What continuous professional development is
• The 9 benefits of CPD
• How to incorporate better CPD processes

Let’s get started.

🚀 Pro Tip

See how Oxford University Hospitals used our tool, SkillFund, to provide a better continuous professional development experience to their learners and to the teams managing budgets, applications etc.

What is continuous professional development

Continuous professional development is a process taken by professionals looking to continue their learning and development.

Where professionals are registered to a regulatory body, e.g. nurses, they are required to complete a certain amount of CPD hours in order to continue their registration.

For example, nurses and midwives go through the revalidation process every 3 years in order to remain registered.

💡 Pro Tip

Learn how we support healthcare providers to deliver better CPD in nursing and beyond with our CPD tool, SkillFund.

Create a CPD hub using SkillFund

9 benefits of continuous professional development

When you start a new role, no matter what industry, you will usually go through a training on onboarding process.

This is an essential step when getting familiar with new processes, tasks and tools.

Related: How to create a good onboarding experience

Once mandatory training is over, you might be left wondering what to do next. Or, you might be obliged by your regulatory body to complete further learning.

Whatever the case may be, CPD is a hugely beneficial tool for 9 reasons:

• Build your skills
• Develop your confidence
• Provide better outcomes
• Stay motivated
• Find new passions
• Be open to new opportunities
• Keep up to date
• Reflect and grow
• Hit key requirements

Let’s look at these benefits in more detail.

Build your skills

Starting with the obvious one, of course learning impacts your skills. Whether that’s developing new skills or improving existing ones, there’s a lot to be gained from CPD.

With a range of courses and learning available, you can really cast the net and widen your capabilities.

The great thing is that the number of hours required or involved means you get plenty of experience in that subject too.

Develop your confidence

As you develop your skills through learning, confidence in your ability will increase too. No matter what skills or experience you’re gaining, it’ll have a compounding effect.

Training, whether that’s via a seminar, online or on-the-job experience, will impact soft skills like communication, leadership and problem-solving. All in all, this will help learners feel more confident in their role and perform better.

Provide better outcomes

With learners improving their skills and growing in confidence, they’re also becoming better at their job.

Whether that means spotting how processes could be improved, being able to complete tasks more quickly, or just generally doing tasks to a higher quality, all of that has an impact on outcomes.

In a healthcare setting, this could mean better patient care. Given the state of healthcare, even small improvements can be hugely impactful.

Stay motivated

Investing time into yourself and developing in your career can reinvigorate your motivation.

Taking time to complete CPD can open you to new resources, new opportunities and points of view.

Find new passions

With so many different courses and learning opportunities available, it’s highly likely that you’ll find something that might be a little different to what you do day-to-day, but that could open the door to something new.

Whether that’s a new skill or a whole new specialism, investing in your learning allows you to grow and develop as a person and test your interests.

Be open to new opportunities

When you’re learning new information and skills, you might wind up finding something new that you really enjoy or are really good at.

Developing new and existing skills can open you up to new job opportunities whether that’s in the sector you’re already working in, or something new.

Keep up to date

By continuing to learn, you’re ensuring that knowledge and skills are kept fresh and up to date. This is critically important in sectors like healthcare, as it ensures good patient care since learners are refreshed in their knowledge.

Reflect and grow

One key aspect of the CPD cycle is reflecting on your learning activity and using it to develop in your role.

This is important for developing emotional intelligence and ensuring you approach challenges armed with the knowledge and confidence you need.

Hit key requirements

Of course, for some, CPD is a requirement of their role.

As such, CPD can sometimes feel like a tick box. But, by investing early in continuous professional development, you can ensure that learning materials are meaningful.

How to better integrate CPD into your learning strategy

Integrating continuous professional development into your learning management system is a must.

Related: 10 best features you need in your LMS

It helps simplify the learning journey and gives one central hub for users to find, subscribe to and complete learning content.  

We created our own CPD hub tool, SkillFund, to support LMS admins with the CPD process.

When an organisation is dealing with potentially hundreds of employees going through CPD, it’s clear a solution is needed to reduce the labour.

With SkillFund, you can:

• Create a catalogue of CPD courses available with powerful search and filter functions
• Link budgets for departments and individuals to CPD so that you can keep track of spend
• Create an application form that then links to your LMS

Sound good? Learn more about SkillFund, and how else we support organisations create better learning experiences by booking a demo with our team.

Book a demo to see our tool and features.

As a leading partner of Totara, you can rest assured that our tech and our people are on hand to deliver the best in class in learning.