Boost your development with a CPD plan

In this article: Without continuing professional development, careers can stagnate, don’t let that happen – put a plan in place

If you take care of your employees, then your business is likely to be a success too. At Vanarama, that’s the ethos behind our push to make sure staff members have a plan of action to keep them progressing in their careers.

Vanarama launched as a van leasing business in 2004 with a team of just three people. Fifteen years on, our Hertfordshire headquarters are home to nearly 250.

With so many people on the team, the challenge is keeping them all motivated, and a CPD plan has been one of the most important tools in achieving that.

One of the biggest investments we have made is in the wellbeing and development of our employees. It’s embedded in our culture, and we even have a core value dedicated to it: “We learn together, we grow together”.

Building it up

I’ve always promoted the importance of CPD, but when the Financial Conduct Authority confirmed that ongoing training would become a regulatory requirement for all insurance professionals, it became clear to me that we had a bigger, company-wide opportunity on our hands.

Thinking beyond the 25 or so staff in our insurance division, I wanted to provide everyone with a CPD facility to encourage and track their personal learning and development progress. That’s when I turned to the IMI.

Our training academy has been an award-winning IMI-approved assessment centre for many years, and at the start of this year I considered IMI affiliation. I already knew that the IMI’s CPD platform was modern, functional and could help us take this to the next level. Affiliation gave all staff access to this CPD portal, as well as professional recognition and a wide range of additional benefits.

Keeping track

One of my reasons for choosing the IMI’s CPD platform was that it’s so easy to use. For example, if you’ve attended one of our internal workshops, you can just log in, select the CPD activity type, enter the course title, date, how long the learning took and if it was assessed. It doesn’t have to be assessed, but if it is, this will certainly strengthen the learning.

The ‘new knowledge and skills’ box in the system can, and does, help to crystallise the learning and increase the likelihood of behavioural change. Similarly, extra CPD ‘impact’ credits are earned if behaviour has demonstrably changed, and the CPD count can improve even further if these changes produce a positive impact on day-to-day processes. Again, the portal allows all of this to be logged, and you can also upload evidence, learning logs and certificates easily, all in about two minutes!

Why bother?

Measuring the effectiveness of training in order to determine a return on investment has long been a challenge for businesses. In many cases, it’s not that the training isn’t effective – it’s more that businesses are failing to monitor progress in relation to an individual’s performance.

In short, good CPD processes can help to make the training stick!

At Vanarama, we have started to use CPD as part of our staff development process, and we will be embedding it in monthly manager conversations around personal growth.
It’s a powerful recruitment point for us too, particularly where it’s clear that top candidates genuinely care about how much training they will receive.

John Fogerty FIMI is Training and Development Director at Vanarama

Find out more about how the IMI can help you develop a CPD plan

This is an edited extract from IMI's new MotorPro magazine, received free as part of IMI membership. Time to find out more about becoming a member of the most influential community in UK automotive…?