CPD

My "professional society", the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, has introduced a new scheme for continuing professional development. Firstly, I am completely in favour of CPD as it is needed to ensure that competence is maintained in a changing world.

The old CPD system was relatively cumbersome but had some logic about it - you were awarded points according to the courses you went on, the new things you did as part of work, research that you carried out, any extra training or skills that you had developed. You needed to attain 20 points over 2 years. As an example, a 1-day course gave you two points. A week's course that was examined gave you 15 points. That was all very well and good, and was relatively easy to understand - you could get points in one of 5 categories, including training courses, self-development, etc. IOSH being IOSH, there was a separate section for attending their branch meetings, their courses or even for writing their exam questions. Annoying, but those sections could be ignored.

The new system is based on-line rather than being paper-based, which will be an improvement. However, they have been promising that it will be available for months...! The new sections are as follows:

1. "Maintaining core professional knowledge and skills"
   
2. "Developing new professional skills"
   
3. "Developing transferable skills"
   

In other words, complete bo!!ocks. You allocate your own points by "reflections" after you've completed an activity. Ridiculously, you can award yourself points for completing a training course, they award more points for the same course later on when you've used the information. You choose how many points you award yourself, so as long as you can argue from it when the CPD file is audited, you get what you want. Seeing as no-one else will know exactly what you do or how you work, it becomes very easy to just award yourself what you want.

You even get 3 points (out of 30 needed over 3 years) simply for planning. The plan can be done at the END of the 3-year cycle...

In the guidance (which is available as a download on the IOSH website in case anyone is in the slightest interested), they state that you can award yourself CPD points for activities that you have failed completely.

The guidance itself is one of the least clearly written I have read. It goes into management-speak at every opportunity, and seems to concentrate on having nice pictures of apples on each page rather that giving information. They make the classic mistake (and I'm sure that I am also guilty of it to a small degree) of assuming the audience know the information already.

The other point is that the most points can be obtained from doing things associated with ISOH itself - they are of the opinion that IOSH are the most important thing in Health and Safety, and they have a very high opinion of their own worth. To that end, IOSH are trying desparately to get into the news and the papers as much as possible. With predictable results - senior managers, Telegraph columnists and Jeremy Clarkson get even more irate at the priority put on H&S rather than profitablility.

This is all part of the drive for everyone to receive "chartered" status. It seems to be the main thing that IOSH worries about - I doubt they have ever asked their members or their employers, or business leaders whether they care a jot about IOSH members being "chartered practitioners". It really means very little to me, except for the fact that I will need to change my business card (again) to read CMIOSH rather than MIOSH.

Last thing: why is it the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health not the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health?