Continuous Professional Development for Membership Organisations

What is CPD?

Continuous Professional Development describes the activities that professionals engage in to develop their skills and abilities, and attempts to formalise the time and effort spent doing so.

The benefits for any employers involved are in improving key staff retention and in developing employee knowledge and skills in-house in a sustainable way, both of which help maintain a competitive advantage. 

CPD can be:

• Traditional active learning, such as classroom-based training courses
• Reflective passive learning through absorbing information whilst working
• Self-directed learning by reading/listening to relevant articles and publications

In most cases, the individuals will also want to evidence the time spent and/or awarded. It may be a condition of either their employment or the professional body or institute that they belong to.

Is this relevant to your organisation?

If you’re a professional body or institute with members, you’ll likely have a CPD policy in place, and it will be a requirement of membership.

How can Subscribe360 support this?

If you’re already running an Association/Membership Management System, such as Subscribe360, then you’ve got the foundations in place to support the implementation of CPD with these elements of functionality:

CPD Period

Every person can have a CPD record on the database, and similar to an academic year, you’ll need to set up when the annual CPD period begins and ends (with possibly some variation on when the last activity can be recorded for the year, in order to take into account when something may have been booked and when it was delivered).

CPD Targets

Within each CPD Period, you’ll need to assign targets for each person. You may choose to assign individual targets to each member, or you may have a global one for all members, or the level of membership could determine it. Targets can be Points or Hours based, depending on the Association/Institute's policies on how an activity is recorded.

Adding Activity

Using the Subscribe360 members self-service portal, each member can review their CPD activity in the current period and add items to reflect their recent CPD activities. The example below shows a summary of their current year and how much of this is complete, including a listing of the activities, added so far. Note that some activity recording can be automated, such as any points/hours added from attending an internal event, new items can be added, and non-system generated existing items can be edited.

Events

If your membership organisation runs any events that may contribute to CPD points, these can be set up and managed within Subscribe360. When the member is confirmed as having attended the event, the points are automatically added to their record. A certificate of attendance may also be issued in some situations, such as external candidates.

CPD Certificates

For CPD certificate requirements to be produced, an integrated document generator and templates allow these to be automatically created. CPD certificates can be emailed to the attendee for them to be attached to their records.

For more information on Subscribe360, please Contact Us where a no-obligation demonstration is available on request.