The importance of CPD for employers

In our last post, we looked at how Continuing Professional Development, or CPD, not only enables professionals to be more proactive and strategic in their training, but also allows them to demonstrate their commitment to bettering themselves to prospective employers. In fact, CPD is equally as important to employers.

Indeed, organisations should present their employees with opportunities that will allow them to make the most of CPD and the benefits it represents. By enabling employees to develop and to embrace new skills and ways of thinking, CPD can help boost an organisation’s productivity and efficiency which, in turn, can contribute to its ongoing growth and success.

What’s more, a culture of learning within a company can go a long way to engendering greater loyalty from its employees, leading to improved retention in the longer term.

Sharing and learning

Sharing is key to establishing a learning culture. Companies need to talk about learning more if they want to encourage more people to learn. It’s worth asking employees to share what they’re learning – and what they’ve learned – with their managers and colleagues, explaining why they consider it to be important personally and how they think it might benefit the business. They should also be given time to dedicate to CPD without being made to feel guilty.

Also, the act of recording CPD progress – either via membership of a professional body or a learning and development platform such as MyAxelos for project, programme, portfolio, risk and IT service management – is both rewarding for the employee and evidence that they are keeping their skills and knowledge refreshed.

Employees should be given every chance to expand their professional networks as well. Whether it’s for learning, for sharing ideas or for career advancement, networking – both formal and informal – is a crucial part of everyone’s professional life and their CPD. With access to new ideas, opportunities and ways of thinking, networking will not only help a person grow professionally, but those new ideas can also benefit the company they work for.

Fundamentally, CPD is concerned with improvement. It stands to reason that the more a professional improves their skills and knowledge, the more value they’ll bring to their employer. For this reason, CPD matters as much to employers as it does to their employees.

Find out more about logging Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points with MyAxelos.