By Alan Vallance, RIBA Chief Executive / Jane Duncan, RIBA President
In architecture, we talk about Return on Investment (ROI) all the time in terms of our projects, but what about ROI on development?
Your practice is your people and your people are your business assets. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) isn’t just an investment in their future; it’s an investment in yours.
Every business needs well-trained, knowledgeable staff to survive and prosper. We all know that training your people costs time and money, and it is often hard to calculate an ROI, but have you considered the cost of not training your people? CPD is a great employee motivator; it helps staff morale and avoids the likelihood of costly mistakes being made by people who aren’t trained in the work that they are doing. Ultimately, a well-trained practice improves your practice production and creates a better working environment contributing to better staff retention.
Getting the best return out of your CPD
When planning CPD for your employees, you need to focus on the relevance of the course of activity for the individual and for your business. A CPD cycle encourages you to continually plan, consider and evaluate your team’s development and embed it into your practice and the way you work. This in turn will help you to undertake CPD that’s right for your business to ensure you get the best return on the time and money you invest.
Let’s take a walk through the CPD cycle:
- assess your needs
- identify appropriate CPD activities and learning levels for those needs – formal and structured, informal, self-directed or online
- plan those activities
- carry out the learning
- record CPD activities
- evaluate how they have helped employee development
- reflect on what has been learned, what could be done differently and what other CPD may be needed
- implement the knowledge in practice
- continue to review, reflect and revise
- re-assess your needs
Many practices link training with their yearly performance reviews and appraisals and incorporate CPD into their business plans. Any learning that enhances your people’s role as an architect, their future development or architectural practice is valid.
Ensuring your people are RIBA Chartered Members makes good business sense. RIBA Chartered Membership pays for itself by providing your people with access to unrivalled CPD resources created for architects.
With more than 1,200 free in house CPD materials and opportunities and low cost seminars across the UK, CPD can help you improve the effectiveness of your people.
Give your people access to the tools they need to do their job better, with our latest guidance on CDM 2015 and the Principal Designer role. Yours is a knowledge business and knowledgeable employees are an asset to your business, so help them up-skill and get to grips on a range of industry topics, from BIM and digital design to business management, regulations or legal issues.
Find out more about the benefits of Individual Chartered Membership and our CPD.
