Rich Newsome
Regardless of your profession, Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a great way to enhance your personal proficiency, whilst keeping up to date with the latest technologies and trends within your industry.
For those operating in the architectural and design space, CPDs play a pivotal role within each professional’s career requirements.
What Is CPD?
Continuing Professional Development can be described as activities undertaken by professionals, such as architects, to ensure their professional skillset is kept up to-date with latest industry developments. Generally, they can be split into three categories: structured, reflected or self-directed.
Different Types of CPD Activity
CPD can take on many forms, from training events to conferences and seminars. Attending networking events is also classed as CPD, in some cases. Importantly, many professional institutions such as RIBA, CIOB, RICS, STPI, CIAT, ICE and IStructE require members to undertake a minimum number of CPD hours each year.
Most people associate CPD as a delivered session – normally carried out by a technical person from a building products manufacturer or distributor.
For building product manufacturers, CPDs are an excellent way to demonstrate thought leadership and authority within your space. However, time and resources (or lack of) often prevent companies from investing countless hours into building and delivering a CPD of value.
What Does A CPD Look Like?
As stated in the previous paragraph, CPDs are normally face-to-face interactions, led by a technical representatives from a building materials brand, who will present a session at an architectural practice. This may have involved a product demo and maybe even a buffet lunch, and whilst there is nothing wrong with this approach, there are numerous options available for building products companies nowadays.
The rise in technology has meant that CPD providers now have a variety of resources at their fingertips. As you’re aware, CPDs can now be completely digitised.
By incorporating cutting edge presentation software and high-quality images and videos, a digital CPD can transform the way professionals develop their knowledge and understanding.
And, as more and more professionals are adapting to the recent rise in remote working, now is the perfect time to develop a digital CPD.
The benefit of this approach is the user can access CPD material ‘on demand’ and the provider can reach a far wider audience, 24/7, using course registration as a lead generation tool.
CPDs: Educate, Don’t Sell
At its core, a CPD should enable the participant (whether they are architectural technicians, surveyors, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, and so on), to develop their knowledge and understanding in a key area.
CPDs are not sales pitches. Architects are famous for not wanting to be sold to, particularly amongst the rising millennial demographic who are now finding themselves in positions of decision-making power. In fact, the vast majority of today’s specifiers complete product research before making a specifying decision.
In other words, modern-day professionals want to be as self-sufficient as possible.
So, why not provide these professionals with the resources to help them carry out their research effectively?
How Does Educating Differ To Selling?
The way you deliver your CPD can be subtly adapted to ensure that your messaging doesn’t come across too ‘salesy’.
For example, rather than saying,
“Our X product is the best because…”
Instead, say,
“Liquid applied membranes [or other key product characteristics] are effective because…”
The difference may be subtle, but the second example demonstrates a more objective and un-biased viewpoint, which will resonate better with your CPD participants.
Make Your Learning Objective Clear and Share Your Success Criteria
In a previous life, I was a teacher. During my teaching days, it was all about ‘learning objectives’ and ‘success criteria’. We’d have to share them with our students before every lesson, and they’d be expected to write the learning objectives in their books. This was so that the main aims of the lesson are clear throughout the entire hour (or however long the lesson was).
I thought I’d escaped learning objectives and success criteria, until I started using them again for CPD. What I now realise is that learning objectives and success criteria help to reinforce your core aims and are hugely beneficial for the session attendee (or student).
Making your aims and objectives clear is key to an effective CPD session.
How Can Insynth Help You?
Don’t let a lack of time, budget or digital skills hold you back from delivering a high-quality CPD session digitally.
At Insynth, our team of skilled writers and designers can work with you to develop an informative, educational and digitised CPD enabling you to help your target audience, build your brand, establish you as a thought-leaders within your space and generate more leads.
To learn more about our unique CPD delivery process, talk to one of us today, or read the ultimate guide to CPD for product manufacturers to take your specifier education and engagement strategy to new heights
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.