10,000 Hours

Continued Professional Development:

Sunday brunch, Sun -kissed holidays, the sweet drive home after a hard day’s works. All good things that keep us truckin’. But do you know what I really look forward to? Those rare moments of clarity. In the heady rush of challenges and experiences, thrown at us by life itself, we are sometimes gifted with the sudden and sobering realisation that we have been hurtling along some set path, like some leaf caught in a stream.

Yes, those moments are indiscriminate. One might make itself known to you whilst you are looking windswept and mysterious, gazing out across the ocean. Another might crop up as you stumble home on Mad Friday, Adagio for Strings playing in your head as you step over the various tearful and inebriated revellers.

These moments are uniquely personal. They cry out for a change of direction and the setting of new goals. Sometimes they can be painful, often they make us admit that we aren’t where we want to be in life, frequently they cause upheaval. Yet always, they are worthwhile.

           Though, what if, these moments didn’t have to be so dramatic? What if we could re-create the moment of clarity in our everyday lives, have courageous self-reflection as a habit, constantly tweak our trajectory, consistently improve ourselves? To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, maybe life isn’t about finding ourselves, maybe it is about creating ourselves. I believe it is possible, and it forms the basis of my argument that every professional worth their salt should be engaged in Continued Professional Development.

CPD refers to the maintenance – and development – of skills and knowledge related to professional work, after formal/normative training has been completed. Along with this, it involves exploring and sharpening the personal qualities that support continued improvement and professionalism. There are so many ways to do it as well, it could be anything from having a discussion with colleagues about a contentious issue in your industry or listening to a podcast by an expert in body language. More formally it could be taking online exams or a short course on a subject.

           When you start looking into the world of CPD theory, the jargon can make your eyes start to roll a little. True, stuff like Transformative practice, folkbildning and self-mastery are all examples that would seem at home in any bad self-help book from the 70’s. But don’t reach for your copy of ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Punching Mimes’ just yet, because there is some impressive hard science behind the subject.

           Indeed, it is no surprise that when one investigates the studies supporting CPD, the lion’s share are based in the education sector. This is because those that were interested in the field of learning about learning have quickly recognised that schools that performed exceptionally well were invariably schools in which every participant was a learner, from the principal who was a point of convergence for the CPD ethos, to the kindergarten teachers who were allowed to flourish and grow because of it (Darling-Hammond 2003). 

It stands to reason that it is the way forward. For me, the archetypal ‘moment of clarity’ often led to pursuit of education in any case, and the world that most professionals inhabit today might easily be described as a ‘Knowledge Based Economy’. With the primacy of computing, knowledge is now being recognised as the driver of productivity and economic growth. For an individual to consistently achieve success and increase their fortunes, they must increase their intellectual capital. To put it succinctly, the more you learn, the more you earn. 

On the macrocosmic level as well, business leaders and politicians are starting to wring their hands as automation begins to threaten millions of jobs and brings about new paradigms in productivity. Calls for adult education and re-training will soon be reaching their crescendo. Thinktank ‘Future Advocacy’, for example, estimates that at least one-fifth of jobs in all 650 U.K. constituencies were at high risk of being automated.

Financially then, CPD makes sense. A more skilled/educated worker is a greater asset to all stakeholders of an organisation and personally has more freedom to pursue promotion. Yet what justifies attaining said promotion? Competence and capability, the very foundations of strong leadership, are framed by an ethical dimension and a moral obligation to be the best one can possibly be. These are obtained and maintained by CPD, and this is why life-long learning and development is in the essence of professionalism.

It is a noble thing to take responsibility, and if you have power or seek it, then justification for that may well be found by an effort to continuously improve yourself and your organisation. If you are the head of an organisation and a crisis occurs, what skills, experience and knowledge can your draw upon to save your business family from a ruined reputation or bankruptcy?

 If your company is extorted by hackers holding your data to ransom, have you got the knowledge to calmly deal with that situation? Maybe you have taken a short course on negotiation skills, perhaps you listen to a cyber-safety podcast. Let us not forget though, CPD doesn’t just allow us to avoid failure, it opens the doors to success. When we know, when we truly understand something, a confidence takes hold; not a blustery false confidence, but a genuine self-assuredness. We become less risk averse, and more inclined to chase opportunities when they arise.

This is a primal thing, deep within the cerebral cortex. Animal psychologists Kornell, Son, and Terrace (2007) found that rhesus monkeys would make high-risk high-reward bets on memory tasks when they when they were able to make accurate confidence judgments on how well they remembered pictures. They were displaying meta-cognitive capabilities; in other words, thoughts about their own state of mind, the essence of consciousness. From the humble monkey to the head of the IMF, to begin to master life itself and to use our consciousness to shape the future, we must master risk and the potentiality of losing or gaining that which we consider valuable.

To master risk we require confidence, defined from the Latin fidere, “to trust”. CPD builds that very confidence. For instance, rapidly changing environments such as those found in the medical profession necessarily require CPD in terms of understanding new research and developments, and due to the high-stakes nature of the work, the confidence to own decisions relating to them.

 It should be noted though, that even CPD in peripheral areas is massively helpful because well-balanced people with transferable skills can have a positive effect in most any situation. As evidenced recently by a small tweak to the wording of a text message routinely sent to NHS outpatients: the mere inclusion of a reminder of the ￡160 cost of upcoming appointments reduced non-attendance by almost 25% in a trial at Barts NHS trust in London. Nationwide, that could mean a saving of ￡1 million per week for the Health Service.

           Personally, I have been inspired to write this argument for CPD after having a great experience on a two-week residential course in Risk Management with Frontier Risks. Being around people who have a great attitude towards growth just brings an intellectual excitement that is palpably energizing. For me it presented a golden opportunity to find some of the best CPD practices all in one place; challenging practical exercises, great lectures on risk and related topics, deep conversations leading to new insights and perspectives. After completion I was left with a positive outlook that has translated into a fulfilling appreciation for Continued Professional Development, and I wont be relenting any time soon. So give it a try, face the future with positivity. Something you learn on the journey of professional development might be used in every day interactions, or it might be in your back pocket for a rainy day… or both. In any case, the learning was worthwhile. They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something, which sounds like a long time, but the time will pass anyway. Why not make the best use of it?

Article written by former SRMC and Graduate @Michael Fisher