Continuing our look at what L&D membership organisations see as the priorities for members’ professional development, the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) shares its thinking.
What does professional development look like for L&D professionals in 2013?
Peter Cheese, chief executive, CIPD
The growing concern of organisations around the world on finding and developing the right skills, the sheer pace of change in the world of work, and the need to drive organisational agility and innovation creates opportunities for L&D professionals to cement their role as agents of change.
There’s never been a more important time for our profession to add value and make a real difference. But the opportunities also require us to develop our own agility, to better understand the outcomes of learning and training interventions, and to align these to business goals.
We must also respond to the huge changes and opportunities that technologies are bringing to the world of learning – embedded and continuous learning, as well as online and virtual learning environments, which are starting to truly scale through massive open online courses (MOOCs) and many expect will dramatically alter the world of adult education in particular.
We are seeing the core role of L&D professionals being extended through growing specialisms in everything from coaching and mentoring to organisation development and design. The CIPD itself has already shifted from a position where we perhaps too readily saw L&D as a single, narrow specialism within the HR profession, to providing clearer and more dedicated routes for L&D professionals to gain qualifications and extend their own professional development. But we know we need to do more, listening to the needs and concerns, keeping up with the key trends, responding faster to help shape the future.
We’ve been expanding the number of courses and qualifications in broader areas such as coaching, psychology and neuro science, partnering with the likes of the British Psychological Society and The OCM (formerly known as the Oxford School of Coaching and Mentoring), to ensure that the learning we offer is best in class.
We will continue to run major events focused on L&D professionals, such as our HRD Conference and Exhibition in London on 24-25 April, with seminars ranging from learning technologies to creating learning cultures. We’re also very engaged in some of the bigger debates in education and learning, in particular supporting apprenticeships and vocational education and raising visibility to these routes into work with employers and educators.
We will also be doing more to help shape the understanding of learning outcomes and ROI in people – a topic which has been around for so long, but now has a much greater immediacy and importance as the economy continues to flat-line.
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