The term Continuing Professional Development (CPD) may not sound like the most exciting diversion from your day job and it’s true that embarking on training – whether formal or informal – will require a certain amount of planning, time and investment.
But dry, industry-standard terminology aside, CPD is an excellent opportunity to learn new skills that can be fed into your professional work. The pay-off for your investment is a more adaptable, capable and multi-skilled workforce, better able to present to clients, understand complex interdisciplinary projects and deal with key business issues.
CPD is used in all sorts of industries, in many countries, and affiliated courses work on a points system. The idea is that practitioners in any given industry who undertake CPD courses will maintain a range of professional standards and knowledge for their industry. Some professional institutions even stipulate that CPD training is undertaken as part of membership, although there are no such formal requirements in the UK design industry.
There are, however, a number of design industry-focused training courses and schemes that have CPD points attached to them. Of course, training without CPD points attached can still be extremely valuable in improving skills and abilities, so it’s not essential to stick to points-based courses if your objective is mainly to learn new things and improve your capabilities.
What can CPD offer designers?
Working in or running a design consultancy may demand a lot of different skills, aside from the core design disciplines themselves. Broadly speaking, these requirements could be organised into the following areas:
- The work: marketing, promotion, relationships and communications
- The business: strategy, structure, finance, culture and leadership
- The market: design industry and client markets
- The law: policy and legal
Within these broad headings lies a multitude of activities, which we’ll look at in greater detail shortly.
At this point, it’s worth saying that there are courses and events specifically prepared to give designers and design businesses better skills in pretty much all these areas.
Many of these can be found in the Training for designers section of our directory listings, which are continually being added to and updated.
The purpose of this guide is to provide an overview of the types of training available and how they might be of benefit to designers and consultancies.
People who are motivated to improve will become more profitable, faster. Yet employers don’t invest in training because they don't think their people will stick around for long and their investment will walk out the door when they leave. On the other side, employees don't see any investment in development for themselves so think their employers don’t care and move onto the next job. For an industry that trades on its visionary ability, this is the kind of lack of vision that’s holding back growth in the design sector.
Julian Grice, Chief Executive Officer, The Team
Who pays for CPD?
In most instances, your employer would pay for professional training as part of an investment in the design business’ staff skills. And this guide should help you to make a case for the value of staff development training to any employer who is reluctant to part with the cash.
The training courses we send our staff on are considered part of our personal development programme, which helps with staff retention, job satisfaction and motivation. Nick Howe, Managing Director, Uniform
There are also some schemes which fund skills development directly. Train to Gain, for example, is a Government funding and support programme for employee training. Its Leadership & Management strand offers £500 towards certain types of training, plus matched funding of an additional £500 if the business invests the same amount. Full details are available from the Train to Gain website.
Matt Desmier, head of the Enterprise Unit at the Art Institute in Bournemouth, uses this funding to provide a service training designers in Adobe CS4 software.
Anyone can apply for the Leadership & Management money for training in marketing skills, leadership skills, human resources skills and so on. But generally design companies work with their heads down and don’t think about things like this. So we work with the South West Design Forum to reach designers and offer this software training through Train to Gain. Matt Desmier, Head of Enterprise Unit, Art Institute, Bournemouth