Continuous Professional Development

The IRO has adopted the concept of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to provide members at every level with an effective method of recording, maintaining and regularly updating details of their skills and knowledge of railway operating and the wider railway industry in general.

What is CPD?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a combination of approaches, ideas and techniques that will help you manage your own individual learning and personal growth. It is a simple process for IRO members to identify, define, improve, develop and monitor relevant professional skills and work-related knowledge to support your ongoing career.

You should also utilise CPD to help increase your professional standing and pursue longer-term career goals. These are then recorded in a portfolio of evidence that is accredited annually and provides you with a certificate to demonstrate your professional development.

Benefits

How CPD benefits you

The benefits of CPD aren’t just felt when you’re going for promotion or upgrading your membership. Many employers now value ‘CPD as a core competency. Undertaking CPD provides the following benefits:

• It is an investment you make in yourself and helps you keep your skills and professional knowledge up to date
• It prepares you for greater responsibility and helps achieve career goals by focussing on your training and development
• It builds confidence and credibility, you can see your progression by tracking your learning in an evidence portfolio that demonstrates your proactive efforts to develop yourself that the IRO will certify.
• The evidence portfolio will give both current and prospective employers confidence of your development. This allows you to showcase your achievements and is a handy appraisal tool.

How CPD benefits your organisation

As organisations shift the responsibility for personal development back to the individual, the ability and insight to manage your own professional growth is seen as a key strength. Benefits for your organisation include:

• Helps maximise staff potential by linking learning to actions and theory to practice.
• Helps HR professionals to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) objectives, for training activity to be more closely linked to business needs.
• Promotes staff development. This leads to better staff morale and a motivated workforce helps give a positive image/brand to organisations.
• Adds-value, by reflecting it will help staff to consciously apply learning to their role and the organisation’s development.
• Linking to appraisals. This is a good tool to help employees focus their achievements throughout the year.

What is the process?

CPD isn't a fixed process, although we do lay down certain basic processes. Fundamentally, it's a question of setting yourself objectives for development and then charting your progress towards achieving them. It's about where you want to be, and how you plan to get there. Our approach is based on reflection that focuses on outcomes and results, rather than 'time spent' or 'things done'.

Is it time consuming?

We’re not concerned with how much time you spend on training courses or how many boxes you tick on a form. CPD is about capturing useful experiences and assessing the practical benefits of what you have learned. There is one question that you should ask yourself to evaluate every piece of learning: what can you do now that you couldn’t do before? Similarly, when you record your CPD, it’s the value of the activity that counts. It’s not what you did, but how you can use what you learned.

Why should I keep a CPD record?

As a professional, you have a responsibility to keep your skills and knowledge up to date. CPD helps you turn that accountability into a positive opportunity to identify and achieve your own career objectives.

At least once a year, we recommend you review your learning over the previous 12 months, and set your development objectives for the coming year. Reflecting on the past and planning for the future in this way makes your development more methodical and easier to measure. This is a particularly useful exercise prior to your annual appraisal!

Some people find it helpful to write things down in detail, while others record 'insights and learning points' in their diaries as they go along. This helps them to assess their learning continuously. These records and logs are useful tools for planning and reflection: it would be difficult to review your learning and learning needs yearly without regularly recording in some way your experiences.

What are the benefits of keeping a CPD record?

CPD is an investment that you make in yourself. It’s a way of planning your development that links learning directly to practice. CPD can help you keep your skills up to date, and prepare you for greater responsibilities. It can boost your confidence, strengthen your professional credibility and help you become more creative in tackling new challenges. CPD makes your working life more interesting and can significantly increase your job satisfaction. It can accelerate your career development and is an important part of upgrading your IRO membership.

How can the IRO help me with my CPD?

The IRO will guide you through the basics of the CPD programme, provide you with mentoring and networking opportunities to supplement the scheme, and provide certificates of attendance for IRO events to prove that attendees are making steps to increase their professional standing through their presence.

If you take part in the mentoring events we simply ask you take brief minutes of your meeting and include it in your CPD portfolio.

The IRO has a network of Area Groups that hold meetings on subjects closely associated with the day to day operation of the railway. The subjects are also closely mapped to the learning outcomes of the IRO’s educational modules that form the basis of our accredited Certificate, Diploma and Degree programme through Glasgow Caledonian University. Attending these Area Group meetings will provide you with a useful vehicle to progress your CPD.

Sign up as a member to take part in the IRO CPD scheme.