| Continuing Professional Development |
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CPD - making the most of your 9-5 time
Did you realise that there are abundant learning opportunities in your workplace which can contribute towards your CPD? |
CPD activity undertaken for ACCA Realise should be relevant to your job and/or your career aspirations. By focusing on learning at work, you can easily meet the CPD requirement – and enjoy a more conscious, profitable learning environment at work into the bargain.
Learning – back to basics
Being coached or signing up for an online course are obvious choices for work-based learning. But consider the following examples:
1. Reading
Magazines and newsletters – and their online versions – can add richly to your knowledge. But don’t just take advantage of technical updates available in accounting & business. Trade journals for your industry sector can also provide invaluable intelligence to help you understand organisational challenges and think more laterally about how finance can contribute. If you have left accountancy and finance, it’s all the more important to look for news and views about your chosen field. To help you achieve CPD through regular reading, why not subscribe to newsfeeds and e-mail updates – many are free.
2. Consulting colleagues
It may seem to some an unlikely source of CPD but there’s no reason why you can’t gain learning through consulting colleagues. Think about the number of occasions you’ve learned something from a lengthy chat with your boss or a briefing from a colleague. Add up all those mini-development activities and you could be looking at a considerable amount of learning time. Keep a record of when you have learned something significant from such a discussion, noting the time you put aside with your colleague, who they are, what you learned and how you’ll apply your acquired knowledge.
3. Internet research
Who knew that Google could extend its global reach into ACCA Realise? Well, it already does for the many members who conduct research exercises for work purposes. Of course, you may have your own search engine of choice – but the point is that those countless occasions where you turn to the internet to dig up information for a project or prepare for a meeting may constitute legitimate development activity.
4. Making site visits
Getting out into the field is important for engaging with the workforce and also representing and promoting your team. Visiting branches or sites at home or overseas can often be a learning experience. For example, invitations from colleagues, customers or suppliers to tour production plants, factories or building sites may be ideal opportunities. Think about what you’d learn and how you’d use that knowledge back at your desk.
5. Sitting on working groups and committees
Volunteering (or being delegated) to sit on committees for special projects can provide legitimate development activity. Especially where you’re working alongside colleagues from other functions (or suppliers or clients), and have to understand their roles in a process chain or stake in an outcome, you might easily be assimilating new information as you go along. For those who are more experienced, or appointed to the group as ‘the expert’, you might think you are merely there to impart information but in fact it’s a great opportunity to enhance a variety of soft skills such as chairing and facilitating meetings, dealing with group behaviours, keeping the group focused and achieving an end result. These are transferable skills: you can take them with you and use them throughout your career.