Professional development learning and logging

One inadvertent result of the pandemic is how accessible webinars and online training courses have become. I have been a professional member of the Career Development Association of New Zealand since 2000, becoming a Fellow of the organisation in 2014. As part of my membership, I need to do at least 30 hours of professional development each year, which, as we have so many more professional development options available in a post-Covid world, has become very easy to meet; no, to exceed.

I am on a number of mailing lists - CERIC, CICA, APCDA, NICE and CDANZ - so most years I get around 500 hours of PD, with webinars, courses, reading, and videos. Doing the PD is great fun: not only the learning, but the interaction with other professionals, the challenges, the application, and just seeing how others are working in the field. We get multiple breaths of fresh air; we get to see old theories through new eyes. I want to keep learning - need to keep learning - so I can continue to deliver a professional service to my students and clients. 

What is NOT fun is logging all the professional development that I have attended. CDANZ has previously stated that the organisation intends to interrogate the collected PD log data for PD ideas, so it is important that we enter our PD data accurately. So, if the organisation is to learn from us, we members need to log all PD completed each year. The membership committee is then tasked with auditing 10% of the resulting logs per annum. 

When it comes to logging our PD, there are ten fields which need to be keyed/selected/copied into the online website form for each PD event. I need to select which period each relates to; what type of activity it was; and the title; and a description of the event. Next I have to add the date of the event; the provider of the training; and the venue. Then I need to write a reflection for each. Now I finally get to how long the session was. Lastly CDANZ has a competency-based system, so I need to log which of the 28 competency flavours relate to each piece of professional development completed. Often, four or five relate. I usually have at least 150 separate entries for my hours, so each 'line' of ten entries represents at least separate 3000 fields. And writing 150 reflections. This represents several days of admin each year. 

The entering of this data has become more onerous, and it is the slog of it which made me pause to think about whether there really is another way. Someone once suggested that I simply enter enough hours to meet the minimum, but that does not meet the organisational need, which was surely why I was doing all this faffing about each year...?  

It seems to me that it is the attending of events which makes for our practice being current; not the logging of them.  Post-event reflections have utility (Chow & Luzzeri, 2019), but going through the motions of smashing out 150 reflections seems likely to me - through the sheer volume - to add little. It seems more likely to me that writing one master reflection on the completed year's PD may provide greater value. 

Sidenote: are those on the membership committee who audit our PD logs expert in evaluating the quality of member's reflections? 

I guess what I am concerned about is that our career development organisation seems to be adopting a lower trust model, where 'writing down' is viewed as evidence, as a proxy for actual learning. But - like safety practices - the writing down of it proves nothing. Data entry does not make us safer, or make us better career practitioners. If we are genuinely too idle to do PD, surely we would be unlikely to have scruples about copying a PD log from another person; or prevent us from inventing a PD log from whole cloth? 

Which brings me to another point: why did we do this to ourselves? When did creating this member burden of proof via written down logs as evidence become as important as learning?

I would imagine that there are few people in the career field who do not have access to PD today. Perhaps we should stop asking those of us who are doing lots of PD to do administration, and instead randomly ask 10% of members each year to submit their PD log. Then members can keep their own records, and supply when requested. Also, if the organisation suspects some members may not be staying up to date, they could perhaps add one or two to the random selection.

Would this work? 

What other, better ways are there? 

Sam

References:

Chow, G. M., & Luzzeri, M. (2019). Post-event reflection: A tool to facilitate self-awareness, self-monitoring, and self-regulation in athletes. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 10(2), 106–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/21520704.2018.1555565