By Guest Blogger:

Russell Ward

Co-Founder of Meta Capability

This article is a continuation from Part 1 published on the Memberwise blog on the 28th February 2019. The illustrated system was created for and with the RIBA.

Getting recognition for completing CPD

Everyone likes to be recognised for their achievements, especially if they have spent their valuable spare time to develop. Here are some interesting facts around recognition:

 When asked what leaders could do more of to improve engagement, 58% of respondents replied “give recognition” (Psychometrics)

  • Millennials require immediate recognition for accomplishments (York College of Pennsylvania’s Centre for Professional Excellence)
  • 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated (Globoforce)
  • Companies with recognition programs that are highly effective at improving employee engagement have 31% lower voluntary turnover (Bersin)

A common method of recognition from membership bodies is to issue a certificate, often posted, which in this day and age is a bit antiquated. Even in PDF form it is hard to post this online for all to see and not really transferable to Linkedin or other social platforms that most members will be using.

A digital badge customised to the membership body is a better form of recognition which could be posted online to demonstrate their CPD achievements. If you look at the success of encouraging people to give feedback on TripAdvisor by issuing badges you can see just how successful this can be. This method will really encourage people to carry out and complete their CPD taking the burden off the membership body to have to keep encouraging, or in some cases warning its members to carry out their CPD.

So that are some of the issues that the member faces but what about the challenges membership bodies face with administering and monitoring CPD?

From the Membership Bodies’ point of view

A lot of the issues that membership bodies face is the manual nature of monitoring CPD activity which takes time, resource and money.

1. Being able to monitor CPD activity of every member.

Many membership bodies are informed of their members CPD activity and achievements via forms, PDFs or spreadsheets and it is a manual process to monitor what they are doing which is time consuming and cumbersome. There are also cases where CPD records get lost or mixed up which only aggravates the challenges faced by both membership bodies and members.

If this was automated so that the administrator could see precisely what any member has completed, what they have left to do and against the deadlines set by the membership bodies, it would give them more time to spend on other things such as curating quality content for the membership.

2. Being able to encourage or warn those that need to complete their CPD.

If the monitoring of CPD is manual then it will be even more time consuming to have to send out communication that encourages or warns members to carry out their CPD. With automation of CPD activity it is easy to see the progress of every member and the membership body can automate emails against certain bands of activity. So for example a member that has been mandated 35 hours, such as RIBA members, can be encouraged or warned if they are behind with their CPD. This can be very useful to the member as often they are not aware they are behind and are grateful for an encouraging prompt. This can be done on an individual basis or in batches of members who are all in a similar category of CPD achievement.

3. Being able to analyse data on the CPD activity of their membership.

If there is no automation of CPD activity and achievements then it will require even more manual work for the membership body to analyse the overall data on ten of thousands of members. If automation is activated the data could provide insight such as:

  • How many members haven’t started their CPD, how many have done 5-10 hours, 10-15 hours etc.
  • What are the most popular CPD topics/goals
  • What percentage of the membership complete their CPD goals each year
  • What is the most popular content. This would apply if you have linked content to CPD gaps and goals. This can in turn inform the content strategy for the membership body.
  • And much, much more.

4. Being able to automate recognition and attainment of CPD goals.

Once again sending out certificates via post or electronically can be a manual and time consuming process. The recognition of achievements can be completely automated as per the digital badges above.

All of this is technology is available now and can be part of a CPD solution membership bodies can offer their members.

Conclusion

The membership bodies have the opportunity to address how they help members conduct and capture their CPD. In doing so the membership body opens itself up to the flip side of that technology automating the monitoring and communication around CPD with their members.

The benefits are immense for all parties as it will be an engaging CPD experience for the member encouraging them to interact with the membership body’s website. That gives immense value to the membership fee (membership bodies may choose to charge for various aspects of CPD such as higher value content etc creating a new revenue stream) so improves retention. It also entices millennials and gives them a CPD solution they will use via their smart phone so growing the membership base of the membership body.

Russell Ward ([email protected] M: 07813 32323) is a published author and Co-Founder of Meta Capability Ltd which is a cloud based learning and development technology company that changes capability. He provides bespoke next generation CPD capture and monitoring solutions that can also link bite-sized content to members CPD gaps and goals. www.metacapability.com