and CPD
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is all about keeping up to date with current practices within your working environment and beyond. It is about developing existing skills and acquiring new ones along the way. Volunteering with Planning Aid England is a great way to achieve this, whilst also allowing others to benefit from RTPI members’ professional knowledge and skills.
Volunteering with Planning Aid England could be a major component of RTPI members’ personal and professional lifelong learning programmes, as it provides opportunities to:
- gain experience of working with those affected by the planning system
- gain insights into less familiar areas of the planning process
- gain experience outside the day-to-day working environment
- keep up-to-date with planning practice
- share networking opportunities with other planning professionals.
Good professional development opportunities arise where the participant gains knowledge and experience in an unfamiliar environment. The opportunity to learn within the Planning Aid England environment is immense and this can only be good for members’ professional development and the profession’s role within the community. As well as gaining knowledge, volunteering can provide the chance to develop new skills; for example, a volunteer working primarily in a more desk-based role may relish the prospect of developing presentation and group facilitation skills.
However it is not necessarily the case that every aspect of volunteering with Planning Aid England will contribute to an individual member’s CPD. As with all CPD, it will depend on the member’s own Professional Development Plan (PDP) and their existing level of skills and knowledge. Two members participating in the same activity will not get the same CPD from it. As the RTPI guidance states, “nothing should be automatically accepted as CPD unless you have personally learnt from it”.
We encourage volunteers to remember to include their volunteering with Planning Aid England on their CPD logs and PDPs. Also, after participating in a training event or helping deliver an activity, volunteers should reflect on the skills and knowledge they have gained, what they have learnt, what they might do next to develop this learning further and how it relates to their PDP.
- Further information: CPD FAQs on the RTPI website