Cultivating competence

LI life: CPD recording

Continuing professional development (CPD) isn’t just a bureaucratic exercise; it’s fundamental to effective practice says Ben Gosling, the Landscape Institute’s communications manager.

In March 2016, at the University of Sheffield, the LI hosted a two-day conference on Beauty, function, and sustainability in the age of austerity.

After almost a decade of public spending cuts, the conference asked whether ‘beauty’ remained a necessary consideration in design. Some weren’t convinced; they argued that to justify its place in a frugal economy, landscape ought to disentangle itself from such dispensable concerns.

The coming six years would bring with them a host of new concerns: political upheaval, public health crises, the public realisation of climate catastrophe, and more. Such turmoil could easily make beauty seem like a frivolous distraction. And yet, the draft national model design code and National Planning Policy Framework have made it a strategic priority. Planning discourse is opening to a kind of holistic beauty: one that exalts not just visual appeal, but the beauty of happy, healthy lives lived within connected communities. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, but also in the sum of the parts beheld. What might have once seemed inessential is now coming to underpin modern practice.

One of the most exciting facets of landscape practice – its mutability – is also one of its most challenging. Landscape professionals work not just with changing topographies, but within ever-changing systems of thought. Continuing professional development (CPD) isn’t just a bureaucratic exercise; it’s fundamental to effective practice.

The LI CPD year runs from 1 July to 30 June. During this time, the LI asks all members – excluding affiliate, retired, and student members, and those on the Pathway to Chartership – to complete a minimum of 25 hours’ CPD activity.

CPD can be anything – academic or vocational, planned or unplanned, private or professional – that contributes to an individual’s development goals. The LI doesn’t prescribe the types of activity that count as CPD, as an individual is the best judge of whether an activity has been professionally valuable to them. We do ask that members devote at least 10 hours per year to structured learning, and recognising the crucial importance to our work of climate and biodiversity outcomes, we also ask that at least five hours cover climate, sustainability, resilience, and environmental and biodiversity net gain.

We support members in meeting their development objectives by delivering national and local events, free webinars, online case studies, policy and technical resources, on-demand learning via LI Campus, our online community LI Connect, and more besides. And via the MyLI members’ area, we offer a simple and intuitive CPD recording tool that makes logging and looking back on your professional development as easy as possible.

For more information on professional development for LI members, visit www. landscapeinstitute.org/membercontent/cpd.