From the recent CPD and Learning Survey that I recently ran, I want to now start looking at the comments that have been left by the respondents. Rather than just list them, I will blog about them individually or group a couple as some of the comments provide an interesting insight into how CPD (Continuous Professional Development) is considered.

All entries to this survey were anonymous.

The first comment I want to analyse is:

Anything I do is on my own time and for my own personal development

From my experiences working and learning, I have found that any learning done in and outside work around the areas that I do during my daily working career have been applied without thinking about it. Personally I would find it hard to apply a level of consciousness to separate any learning done in my own time to my job, unless it was a very different type of learning (such as learning to canoe or play the piano).

There is a need for employers to support development of its employees which can take many different formats such as:

• Time
• Courses
• Exam fees
• Brown Bag Learning (lunchtime learning sessions)

Providing support does provide a better culture for learning in the workplace, but this is a two way street and employers may require you to develop your skills with the same time they provide inside work as outside work.

Looking out across the various industries and their CPD requirement, some industry verticals have to do development to keep their qualifications such as the medical profession. There is a mixed bag of support and no support for employees, however they are doing it as part of their daily routines.

At the end of the day CPD is a choice for the individual and how much time you are willing to invest in your own development. To pinch a bit of Shakespeare (with a tweak):

To CPD or not to CPD that is the question?

For me the answer to this is simple. If you do not decide to carry out your own CPD, others around you most probably are.

The next generations of IT Professionals are already learning from an early age supported by Government Educational Curriculum’s.

These types of support will bolster the IT Industry and with more choosing it as a career also drive towards the Era of the Contextual Web. The next generation will develop key skills at an early age that they can just create the tools and applications that they need when they want them. Maybe they wont spend much time playing the xBox or Playstation, but coding them instead.

The next level of Innovation and entrepreneurship may just come from a 10-11 year old!

Learning can feel like “Keeping up with the Jones” and a “marathon” at times, but if you do not have a plan to develop, you may be on the pavement cheering those who do by.

I have analysed the results for the IT Professionals and CPD survey I have been running recently and this blog post is to show them.

There were 21 replies to the survey. I would have liked more, however the results illustrate a sample of what IT Professionals are doing for development and CPD.

Remembering of course not to get too pulled into the “Echo Chamber Effect” https://maxhemingway.com/2015/01/13/the-echo-chamber-effect/

The survey covered 7 questions and out of the 21 replies, some of the questions have 1 reply skipped and some have none. The skips were across different replies so this is not one reply missing questions.

In this blog post I will show the initial survey results, then I will go into more analysis, details and thoughts around the responses in further blog posts.

(click on the graphs if you want to see a larger version)

Question 1: Do you belong to a Professional Body?

With this question I was aiming to see how many replies are influenced by a professional body and their rules on CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and Learning.

Out of the 21 replies, all 21 responded to this question.

• 28.57% (6 replies) – Yes
• 71.43% (15 replies) – No

There are lots of professional bodies in the industry today with some being more stronger than others with memberships. I was expecting fewer Yes votes to this question, but was pleasantly surprised to see just under a 3rd being members of a Professional Body.

Question 2: Which Professional Body do you belong to?

Following on from Question 1 I was then looking to find out what Professional Bodies were represented in the survey. I listed a few Professional Bodies, but also gave the option for other bodies to be entered.

The results below show the surveys listed Professional Bodies – not the manual entered ones.

Out of the 21 replies, 15 responded to this question and 6 skipped.

• 80% (15 replies) – None
• 20% (3 replies) – British Computer Society

Out of the other comments the following Professional Bodies were listed, but not recorded in the above results, so out of the 6 skipped – 3 replied with other answers:

• IET (1 reply)
• TOGAF (1 reply)
• PMI (1 reply)

1 Reply had TOGAF as a result as this is more an Architectural Methodology than a Professional Body. Wondered if they meant member of the Open Group instead?

Question 3: Do you do any development / learning annually?

In the next Question I wanted to find out how many replies carried out learning and development.

Out of the 21 replies, 20 responded to this question and 1 skipped.

• 95% (19 replies) – Yes
• 5% (1 replies) – No

Not sure why 1 reply skipped this question!

Question 4: How many hours do you complete annually developing/learning?

Out of the 21 replies, 20 responded to this question and 1 skipped. Based on the last question and going into the results, the reply that said no skipped this question and the reply that skipped the previous question responded to this question. So the replies to this question do align to the previous one.

• 5%   – 0-10 Hours (1 reply)
• 15% – 10-20 Hours (3 replies)
• 15% – 20-30 Hours (3 replies)
• 10% – 30-40 Hours (2 replies)
• 10% – 40-50 Hours (2 replies)
• 10% – 50-60 Hours (2 replies)
• 0%   – 60-70 Hours (0 replies)
• 10% – 70-80 Hours (2 replies)
• 0%   – 80-90 Hours (0 replies)
• 5%   – 90-100 Hours (1 replies)
• 15% – 100-150 Hours (3 replies)
• 5%   – 150-200 Hours (1 reply)
• 0%   – 200+ Hours (0 replies)

There is quite a spread over the replies illustrating that although most of the respondents carried out annual development and learning there are differences as to how much everyone actually does.

There was one comment on this question

• Depends if you include project related development (i.e. doing some in the course of a project you’ve never done before)

Question 5: Do you record this learning in a CPD Plan

Out of the 21 replies, all 21 responded to this question.

• 33.33% (7 replies) – Yes
• 66.67% (14 replies) – No

These results are roughly in line with question 1 which is interesting at the initial view to ask the question are these CPD’s influenced by a Professional Body or other things. More analysis of the results is needed here.

Question 6: How many hours do you think IT Professionals should spend on CPD annually?

Out of the 21 replies, 20 responded to this question and 1 skipped.

• 0%   – 0-10 Hours (0 reply)
• 0% – 10-20 Hours (0 replies)
• 0% – 20-30 Hours (0 replies)
• 10% – 30-40 Hours (2 replies)
• 20% – 40-50 Hours (4 replies)
• 15% – 50-60 Hours (3 replies)
• 0%   – 60-70 Hours (0 replies)
• 10% – 70-80 Hours (2 replies)
• 0%   – 80-90 Hours (0 replies)
• 5%   – 90-100 Hours (1 replies)
• 15% – 100-150 Hours (3 replies)
• 15% – 150-200 Hours (3 reply)

I will perform some more analysis between questions 4 and 6 to see if there are any correlations between what respondents do annually and what they think should be done annually. More analysis of the results is needed here.

Initially though the graphs show that at least 7 respondents think that they should be doing more than they actually are.

There was one comment on this question

• 1 hour daily

Question 7 : Any other comments you would like to add on the subject of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Hours for IT Professionals?

This was an open question to allow the respondents to. Here are couple of the replies. I will analyse these and the other responses further in another blog post.

• Given the speed of change in IT, I think an average of 2 to 3 hours per week in a mix of verifiable ( e.g. courses (on-line or physical)) and unverifiable- Blogs, papers, news sources, hands on etc. should be a minimum to aim for.
• This is really important and specially capturing and tracking that give sense of learning.

Related blog posts:

https://maxhemingway.com/2015/01/06/it-professionals-and-continuing-professional-development-cpd-hours/

https://maxhemingway.com/2015/01/12/survey-on-it-professionals-and-cpd-hours/