Looking for Professional training? Here’s How to Ensure it's Top Quality!
CPD Courses are an excellent tool for building new skills, advancing your career prospects, and boosting your job performance! CPD is important in every industry and is a crucial element of keeping your specialist knowledge up to date and relevant. This is why it’s important to ensure that the CPD courses you take are of the highest quality and will deliver the learning outcomes you want to achieve.
But how do you ensure that a CPD course meets the criteria? Read on to find out!
1) Is it CPD Accredited?
One way to ensure that a CPD course is quality is if it has been accredited by a CPD Accreditation Body like The CPD Group. CPD Accreditation is the process of recognising and validating that professional development courses meet certain standards and criteria. For example, at The CPD Group, we assess every CPD course against our A.C.C.R.E.D.I.T.E.D Framework to ensure that every aspect of the course is accurate, engaging, and credible.
In order to discover whether a CPD course has been accredited, there are a few things you can look out for. Firstly, you can look out for a CPD Accredited logo like the one shown below…
2) Search The CPD Register
Secondly, you can search for it on The CPD Register. The CPD Register is an independent register of CPD Accredited courses, providers, and trainers. You can verify a CPD course by looking for the accreditation number displayed on their logo. If the course is genuinely accredited, it should appear when you search this number on the register.
3) Check out customer reviews
Customer reviews are an excellent way to make a more informed decision before purchasing CPD Training. Reviews can provide information that is not available through other sources and give an insight into what others have experienced when using the product or service. They provide an unbiased opinion on the course, whether it was good value for money and whether they thought the quality of the training was up to standard.
4) Ask people in your industry
A good way to get some recommendations for quality training is to reach out to your colleagues or other people in your industry. Reach out to people in your professional network, whether this be in your workplace or on professional platforms like LinkedIn. One of your connections may have taken part in an insightful seminar or attended an excellent event that would benefit you too.
5) Make sure it’s right for you
What may constitute quality learning for one person may not be effective for someone else. People have different styles of learning and respond better to different methods of learning delivery. When considering a course, read the description carefully to obtain a solid understanding of the delivery methods and course structure. Is the course an eLearning course or an in person classroom course? What does this have to do with the way you like to learn? How will this fit into your schedule and how many hours are there in the course? All of these are crucial inquiries to make to ensure you get the best learning experience!
6) Who is delivering the course?
The course materials may be excellent, but the person delivering the training can make or break a course. A great trainer is someone who is passionate and experienced in their subject, dedicated to helping their students learn, and focused on creating an engaging and positive learning environment.
An excellent trainer will be CPD Accredited by an accreditation body to verify their expertise. If they have been accredited by us, they will have a CPD Trainer card that can be tapped on any NFC compatible phone to share their trainer credentials!
We hope this blog post has given you some insight into how to choose a great training course! Look out for our next blog post on what to do when training doesn’t go quite as you expected.