PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT INSIGHT
CPD made easy
Helen Hargreaves MSc ChFCIPPdip, CIPP associate director of policy and membership, explains
C ontinuing professional development (CPD) is an important aspect of anyone’s career as it shows that the individual is committed to maintaining and developing the skills and knowledge needed to perform in a professional context. This could mean improving current skills, developing them to a new level, or it could mean learning new skills, paving the way for an employee’s job role to expand or even laying the foundation for promotion. This is especially important for a career in the ever-changing world of payroll, pensions and reward as it allows an individual to show that they are keeping up to date and compliant with changes to policy and legislation. CPD is gaining increasing focus at the CIPP and that focus is only going to become greater moving forward. We know that CPD is an issue that some members struggle with; whether that is finding the time to undertake or record CPD activities, or whether it is because people are unclear exactly what they need to do for CPD. This article aims to help everyone to see how undertaking and recording CPD need not be an onerous task. How do I undertake CPD? Well, you are undertaking CPD right now.
By reading this magazine you are learning about developments in the payroll arena and as such you are undertaking CPD and accruing CPD points. Every time you read the CIPP news email, ask a question of one of your colleagues or even answer a question from one of your colleagues, giving advice and support, then you are continuing your professional development. ...it is crucial to keep up to date... How many of you have been making sure that you know what the new tax and National Insurance contributions rates and thresholds will be from 6 April? Have you been making sure that you know what other changes will happen in the new tax year? And if you have been doing this, have you thought about why you need to know about these changes and how you will find out what they are? I’m sure you will be reading the updates sent to you by your payroll software provider, along with the CIPP news emails and perhaps HM Revenue & Customs’ Employer Bulletin so you can make sure you have all the processes in place to ensure you can pay your workers accurately. This is CPD and
I’m sure that every single one of you have been doing this, but how many of you will record this as a CPD activity? It is because we work in a profession where change is constant, that it is crucial to keep up to date, so if you are doing this anyway why not take the extra couple of steps to incorporate this into a personal development plan and use the CIPP’s CPD logging tool to record your development so you can demonstrate this to your employer and customers? Virtually all of us, all of the time, are undertaking some form of professional development, simply by making sure we know what we need to do to pay workers accurately and on time. CPD takes things a step further by documenting that learning, understanding why the learning is needed, and evaluating whether it achieved its objective. What is a learning objective? In order to log CPD activity you will need to set out your learning objectives. Objectives are important because they set out what you are expected to learn or gain as a result of participating in the learning. And the chances are that, whether you realise it or not, you will have already been setting yourself learning objectives.
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2018 | Issue 38 12
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