Shaping the profession through the CPD Panel

Deansgate Gardens, Bolton. Credit: Placefirst.

Looking back on my childhood, I realise that my upbringing put me on a great trajectory for a career as a landscape architect. I remember visiting the Garden Festivals of the ‘80s and ‘90s, as well as National Trust sites. I had a library of Ordnance Survey maps and made miniature gardens in seed trays.

I arrived in Manchester in 2001 and enrolled at Manchester Metropolitan University on a small but creatively brilliant landscape degree course. The city has since been my home for 23 years – it’s the community, culture and opportunity that have kept me here.

CW Studio was founded by Carolyn Willitts FLI in 2015 and has grown to a team of seven. Our studio is creative, collaborative and chatty, shared with an architecture practice, planning consultancy and marketing agency. On my drawing board at the moment is the landscape design for JD Sports Campus in Bury, a new public space in Manchester’s Chinatown and Deansgate Gardens, a build-to-rent housing development in Bolton.

My voluntary work with the LI began on the Student Landscape Institute Council (SLIC), then the LI North West Branch and since 2013, the CPD Panel.

The CPD Panel is a group of LI members that receives selected CPD submissions each year to review and provide feedback on. The process involves reading through the stated goals, activities and reflections to understand how members have focused their development to support their practice.

Beyond this assessment, we as a panel record areas where we feel members need support to build their capacity in key areas such as climate adaptation, as well as where their input is having a positive impact on the communities they are working in. This information is shared with the Education and Membership Committee and supports the planning of the LI’s CPD programme for members. We are also actively supporting the LI with its digital transformation programme to improve the online CPD recording system. As the profession grows, we have more records to review and need to ensure each record is given the assessment required. We are always looking for new members to the panel to assist with the review process, as well as bring ideas for how we can support members with the recording and reflection of their activities. Shape the future of the profession – get in touch at cpd@landscapeinstitute.org

Lucy Marshall CMLI is Chair of the Landscape Institute CPD Panel.