Growing professionally

Continuous professional development (CPD) is not just about compliance with professional institute requirements: it is a personalised curriculum to shape your future professional path.

What are the optimum subjects and styles to create learning experiences for the future you?

Landscape architecture excels in thinking about time, change and building the conditions for people places. The day job in the profession is demanding, projectfocused and technical. It provides a lot of learning opportunities.

But, like landscapes, we need to build the conditions to grow professionally, so across time, our professional development changes. There is a difference between the skills needed to do the job, and the skills needed to grow. To grow, you need to understand where you are, and where you want to be and use these insights to shape how you best use learning experiences.

Continuing professional development is important. It is not just about compliance with professional institute requirements once in a while. It can be a personalised curriculum to shape your future path and growth professionally.

Reflecting on the CPD submissions from the profession this year, we have drawn out some tips which might help you structure a growth approach to CPD.

Understand your needs

Try to differentiate between the specific needs of your job and the projects within it, and the kind of landscape architect you want to be. What is the vision for the future you? It may be about proficiency in a specific area of expertise, or it may be about leadership, or being an all rounder. Use CPD to reflect on where you are in your own development, and where you want to be.

Map out where you want to be

Objectives help set out the building blocks to help you get where you want to be professionally. There will be near-term demands: things you need to get on top of to make work easier and better. There will be mid-term ambitions, which set out where you will get to if you do get better at things now, and do take the opportunities available. A bit of time thinking where you want to go in your career can help set short- and mid-term ambitions. These ambitions can help focus what learning experiences are most relevant to get you where you want to be.

Work out what works

We all have different learning styles. Some are visual learners, some are auditory, some like talks, some like doing. There isn’t a best way, there is just the way that best suits you. How knowledge is shared and how you learn are different things. People share knowledge on PowerPoint presentations; most people forget what was said within three days. ‘Situated learning’ and ‘problem-based’ learning are useful ways to make sense of knowledge. This is a process of discussion or testing ideas using real situations you are familiar with. Situated learning can achieve up to 80% retention. It works because the learning is made relevant

Be focused on your objective, and extensive on how you achieve it

Once you know where you want to get to professionally, it is helpful to use every opportunity possible. Mix up learning experiences, from selfguided online courses, to podcasts, visits, seminars and debates. Get familiar with different ways of sharing knowledge, different networks, different influencers. And, crucially, at the end of each experience ask a single question: what did I learn?

Reflect

A teacher once suggested that experiencing things isn’t learning. Reflecting on experiences is. There are three stages to reflecting on learning: [a] what did you do. This is a descriptive cataloguing of experiences [b] so what: what did you learn? [c] now what: what are you going to do with the learning? Reflection is a bit like the design process. You decide to do something, you do a little bit first, see if it works, adjust and do more. Reflection isn’t getting lost in directionless thinking. It is a review of what has happened to draw out the most useful material to accelerate development.

Build personal leadership

Professional development is about building our own leadership of our own learning, from being passive recipients of information, to learners who are active seekers and processors of information. Part of this relates to a specific area of leadership development; the Pathway to Chartership. Mentoring is a leadership skill. It is about asking questions, being curious, creating a scaffold for the other person to come to solutions themselves, grow themselves.

As you build these skills, the experience for both parties improves. And you develop. Mentoring needs active leadership skills, and this is more than telling the other person the right answer. Mentoring is a leadership skill that is part of successful business development in many ways, from negotiation, tender interviewing, and policy advocacy to marketing. Reflect on what you are learning as a leader. Seek out other leaders, build mentors around you.

Alvin Toffler was a futurist who shaped thinking on leadership and organisations. He saw the shift from the industrial age, to the information age, and he understood the changing demands this created on skills and professionalism. Toffler suggested that the ‘illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can not read and write, it will be those who can not learn, unlearn and relearn’. Toffler was suggesting that the pace of change happening requires a learning approach, adaptability, growth and progression. Continuing professional development is a way to take time to learn, unlearn and relearn and build the leadership to shape the future of places, and the future of the profession.

Fiona Heron is a landscape architect and consultant on urban design and strategy. Diarmaid Lawlor is Director of Place and Architecture and Design Scotland.