We believe that learning and enabling a growth mindset throughout your sales force is key to running a successful and profitable business, providing an environment that not only develops and retains your existing personnel, but attracts the best talent. As a well-known entrepreneur & philanthropist once said…

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don’t want to”

Continuing professional development (CPD) is the intentional maintenance and development of the knowledge and skills needed to perform in a professional context. This could mean honing current skills, it could mean developing them to a new level, or it could mean learning new ones that will allow an employee’s job role to expand or prepare them for potential promotion.

CPD obligations are present in most professions. Most companies and organisations now prioritise them because they ensure a constantly developing workforce.

CPD activities can range from formal educational activities such as instructor-led training courses, workshops or seminars, to more informal approaches such as work-based learning or mentoring.

Across the UK workforce, CPD is expected of most individual professionals in most sectors. It is generally governed by sector-specific professional bodies or regulators.

Anyone who is a member of a professional body is likely to have CPD requirements laid out for them by the body, rather than by their employer.

Employers will often support with CPD, and may even contribute to CPD plans. However, the onus is very much with the individual to source CPD training activities that meet their personal learning needs and objectives.

When we talk about the benefits of CPD, we are talking about one’s commitment to doing a good job. However traditional your profession may be, innovation inevitably influences it, sometimes changing the admin aspect of a role and, at other times, completely altering the way in which something is done.

To be committed to CPD is to be committed to how good you are at what you do, how accurate your knowledge is, and how well attuned you are to the changes in the world around you. In an even bolder statement, we can say that commitment to CPD is a commitment to the concept of the “survival of the fittest”, as only those who continuously further their knowledge will be the professionals that others will want to work with.

From the perspective of the employer, monitoring CPD is perhaps the easiest way to review employees and gauge the company’s overall level of fitness. As we all know, an organisation or a team are only as strong as its weakest branch.

12 points for attendance at the National Sales Conference, including playback of the sessions running on the co-located tracks. We’ll provide you with a certificate to record your CPD training after the event.