CPD - why it matters so much

摘要

Chair of the IED Colin Ledsome focuses on Continuing Professional Development and the learning experiences that it can bring to any career It's been said that the half-life of the content of the final year of a technical first degree is about two and a half years. The basics you learn in the earlier years will be valid for a long time, but in the final year a student is surprisingly close to learning the latest understanding from recent research and practice. In the early years of a career, designers will most probably work on a rather narrow range of tasks, as they learn to apply, in a pragmatic environment, the understanding gained during their degrees. As they advance, they will move on to other activities and have to apply other knowledge. Can they rely on the memory of their degree learning or should they check for the latest developments? The problem with the half-life situation is you don't know which half. It pays to check. Design work is always about something novel, otherwise you are just copying something that has been done before. Design is an opportunity to learn, even if that only amounts to what is a better understanding of a familiar subject. Meeting with cross-disciplinary teams exposes you to new information. Finding out more about customer requirements, technical details, new materials or production methods is a learning experience. That's what Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is all about - keeping yourself up to date and extending your ability to tackle new things.