Colin King MRTPI is an Associate Director and Senior Urban Designer with O’Mahony Pike Architects, and a Design Fellow in Urban Design at the UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy. He has worked as an urban designer, planner, and architect in public and private sectors in Ireland, UK, Australia and Canada.
I suspect I’d not be alone in admitting that my attitude to CPD was ambivalent. While I understood that it was supposed to be for my own benefit; if I’m honest, it was a bit of a hassle – one more draw on my time in a profession in which there never seems to be enough time. A recent monitoring audit by the Institute surprised me, not only for making me realise that maintaining my CPD has been directly useful professionally, but also for revealing that it had somehow become central to how I work. This has prompted some reflections on reflective practice.
As the sole planner in a large multi-disciplinary firm, I know that as an RTPI members we have it easier than many other built environment professionals in how CPD is monitored. Rather than certificates and proof of attendance to be uploaded and time-stamped by a certain date annually, ours is more of a trust system. There’s an online portal –at least as long as the eight years I’ve been a Chartered Member – we’re trusted to fill it in as we go, or not. This seems entirely appropriate for a profession that often boils down to being trusted with balancing technical knowledge with judgement.
I have been recording my CPD online since my initial registration. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of it as an act of CPD recording. It’s a reference library. Rather than buried in a notebook or a document on a shelf, the CPD log is where I record my annotations of various books, journals, webinars, etc. for later use. The character limits mean that only the most relevant observations are recorded. The very conciseness of the record makes it most useful, as it’s quick to search. When audited, all I had to do was send a link to my profile.
The Personal Development Plan requires extra effort but looking at how I have used this has been revealing. The online log shows that most of my reading has directly come out of project concerns. I can note themes I’ve been worrying away at in my unstructured learning for a year or two and recognise them as something to pick up in my PDP as a focus for structured learning. This in turn influences what seminars or conferences I’ll attend that year.
Over a series of PDP’s I can see patterns emerging – extended periods of unstructured learning that lead to shorter periods of structured engagement. Topics which have dropped down my lists of concerns then climb back into my CPD as things change in the planning environment. Working outside of traditional planning, I lean on RTPI events for structured learning as a tether to the mainstream of planning practice, which in turn flags reading for unstructured learning, and around it goes again.
From all this my conclusion is that I’ve tended to do CPD more than I’ve thought about it. I’ll not try to convince anyone that they should love CPD, but it is worth thinking about your relationship with it.
CPD events
Take a look at our upcoming CPD events on our calendar.
