Make your CPD record useful

A useful record says what changed

A useful CPD record says what changed in your practice. It names the activity, why you chose it, the thing you did differently afterwards and what you noticed. Hours are easy to prove and tell a reader almost nothing.

Most records stop halfway. They hold a title, a provider and a date, and nothing else. When an appraisal comes round, or an application asks what you have developed this year, that list cannot answer the question. You end up reconstructing the answer from memory, months after the detail has gone.

Write the entry a week later

Write the entry after you have used the learning, not on the way out of the room. A week is usually enough. The delay forces the question that matters: what did I actually do with this?

A head of maths in her second year went to a session on questioning. The note she wrote a week later said she had stopped asking whether everyone understood and started asking three named pupils to explain the step back to her. That sentence is worth more than the title of the session, and it is the sentence she will still be able to use in two years.

• What you chose and why you chose it rather than something else.
• The first thing you did differently, in one sentence.
• What you noticed when you did it, including anything that did not work.
• Who else saw the change, if anyone did.
• What you would do next if you wanted to take it further.

Quality beats quantity, by a lot

The quality of development matters far more than the amount of it. The Education Policy Institute reviewed 52 randomised controlled trials for its 2020 evidence review, commissioned by Wellcome. High quality professional development raised pupil outcomes with an effect size of 0.09, close to the 0.11 the review attributes to having a teacher with ten years of experience rather than a new graduate.

That is a large return for something a school can choose. It also explains why counting hours misleads. Two people can log the same twenty hours and take completely different value from them. Only one of them will be able to say what changed, and that is the one whose record is worth keeping.

The five minute format

Keep the structure the same every time so the writing takes five minutes. Date, activity, provider, hours if your employer needs them, then the four lines that matter: why this, what I did, what I noticed, what next.

Write it in plain words, as if telling a colleague. Avoid the language of the course brochure. If you cannot say what you did differently, write that down too. An honest entry saying a session gave you nothing is more useful than a confident one that says nothing at all.

Link the learning to the skill

A record becomes much more useful once each entry is attached to the skill it developed. Over a year you can then see which skills you keep investing in and which ones you have claimed for a decade without adding anything.

That view changes what you choose next. Most people find two or three areas with a lot of activity and one that matters to their next role with almost nothing against it. The gap is more useful than the total.

Do this once a year rather than continuously. Set an hour aside near the end of your learning year, read the entries in order and write three lines about what the year actually taught you. That hour is usually the most useful part of the whole record.

What the record is for

You are writing for three readers. Yourself in a year, when you have forgotten the detail. Your appraiser, who wants evidence rather than attendance. And whoever reads your application for the role after this one.

All three want the same thing: the change, not the certificate. A learning log in OTO Careers keeps the entries against a learning year you choose and ties them to the skills they developed, so the yearly view is there without rebuilding it. The format matters more than the tool, though. A text file with four headings will do.