Encouraging Meaningful Engagement with Professional Development Programmes
Running a professional development programme in a university or professional body setting is a specific undertaking. It would be easy to conflate it with the kind of training and development provided in the corporate environment, which tends to be tied directly to career advancement and company objectives.
Yet professional development for students is a practice with a singular focus on supporting and developing individuals and their own evolving profiles, rather than on meeting the requirements of their organisation. That is, on deepening their understanding of their values and priorities; on developing a broad range of skills; on sharpening their ability to identify and address their strengths and weaknesses; on embedding for life the practices of tracking and reflecting upon one’s progress.
The corporate ‘end result’ might be that an individual is better able to fulfil their duties, or in a better position to move to a more demanding role. The ‘end result’ in a university or professional body is that there is no ‘end result’. By contrast, good professional development provision instils the idea that one’s professional development is a constant pursuit rather than a destination at which we arrive. This is, of course, the essence of Continuous Professional Development – CPD.
Box-tickers and reflective practitioners
Prioritising the needs and development of each student and helping them to prepare themselves for the future is laudable enough. But putting this into practice by delivering a programme of training and initiatives is not without its practical challenges. Perhaps the most obvious of these is ensuring that students engage with your carefully-crafted programme. And when they do, that they engage in a meaningful manner.
Ask any enterprising training programme manager about student engagement and they will cite attendance attrition rates and the attitude of training participants as key areas of consideration. ‘No-shows’ for training sessions and initiatives, apart from being demoralising for administrators and facilitators, are a drag on resources.
The irony here, as training programme managers will know well, is that those who are disengaged are often those who would benefit the most from professional development. Yet it is difficult to engage them if they do not turn up in the first place. Moreover, if their attitude is that professional development is a box to tick, then encouraging them to engage meaningfully while ‘in the room’ is bound to be an uphill struggle. The journey from box-ticker to reflective practitioner can be fraught!
Finding value in professional development
The root of the disengagement problem, of course, is when people do not see or understand the value of professional development to them or to their organisation. In my experience working across universities and professional bodies, I have witnessed a range of approaches to addressing this value perception issue – some more successful than others.
Some providers choose to ask their students to put a monetary deposit down for courses and other provision which is refunded upon attendance, or to fine them for non-attendance, or to use other methods to align disengagement with financial penalty or other potential penalty. This rather draconian approach may boost presence in the short term, but it deals only with the symptoms of disengagement, and not the cause. Ascribing an arbitrary financial cost to is a rather dubious response to the question of how to encourage people to see the value of professional development. One’s personal and professional currency is something far more singular and special than can be expressed in financial terms, after all.
Others might choose to make professional development a mandatory component of a given course or programme of study. Unlike the charging tactic, this approach can be very effective in communicating how important an institution considers CPD to be, and a well-thought-through mandatory programme – perhaps with accreditation as an additional incentive – can provide a strong lever for meaningful engagement. In this context CPD does not have to feel like medicine being administered to professional ‘patients’: it can be part of the day-to-day professional expectation placed upon individuals and deeply embedded into study culture as a result.
Getting to the cause
Encouraging students to see value in their own professional development in terms of currency – whether financial or career-based – is only a halfway solution, however. In the absence of formal reflective exercises, the more genuine professional development value of engagement with training and development might only become apparent to participants after the fact, when they are encouraged to reflect on the impact their development activities have had upon their day-to-day study or work.
The most successful development programmes I have encountered incorporate reflection not only at the end of provision, but also at the beginning, characterising learning as a cyclical pursuit. The theory in this space may be well-trodden (many will cite as far back as David Kolb’s work in 1984, for instance), but it is still relevant. These programmes encourage participants to reflect upon and understand the gaps in their learning thus far, to consider the extent and limits of their professional development learning and experience, and to ponder how the programme of development provision and resources at their institution will help them move forward. For these participants, the value of their engagement is clear from the very beginning, and their engagement from that point onwards is, naturally, meaningful.
Facilitating reflection through tech
The approaches described above use varying degrees of ‘carrot and stick’ – the two sides of the incentivisation coin. Technology can be used to support them, of course: professional development software can provide ways of ‘punishing’ non-attendance and can provide frameworks for submission and assessment of qualifying evidence for accreditation exercises. It can also provide ways of encouraging engagement in itself: platforms with integrated notifications and progress charts can help people visualise their progress where it might otherwise be more abstract, for instance. But by deploying ‘snazzy tools’ specifically to generate engagement we risk making the technology itself the centre of the discussion. It might even be tempting to blame a lack of engagement on the perceived shortcomings of that technology, or to measure engagement with the tool itself rather than with the programme of development.
Beyond helping us discover opportunities more easily, and track and visualise our progress, in my experience a strong technological platform can make the most difference by facilitating reflection and supporting cyclical learning. More than this, it can help make professional development genuinely continuous, replacing paper reflection exercises and one-off self-audit forms to constantly support and challenge students staff to develop their personal and professional profiles. In an ideal world, technology will help them to understand the value of their engagement with professional development from the beginning, in a way tailored to reflect the messaging of their institution and in a way which draws relevant provision and resources around them together into personalised programmes, putting opportunity at their fingertips.
Technology can be a powerful supporter and enabler of professional development programmes, but not in isolation. Engagement in these programmes is driven at least in part by successful communication of their value to participants, and this endeavour has to start with sound strategic thinking on the part of programme managers and directors. The challenge is to encompass imaginative provision and resources into the professional development offering, frame it inspiringly, and focus on the importance of reflection. Then, with a little help from the right tech, the journey from box-ticker to reflective practitioner might not be so fraught after all.
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