The latest issue of Despatch has an interesting lead article about CPD – that’s continuing professional development, where ADIs are supposed to continue their professional training and development in their own time. CPD has been a buzzword among the unwashed masses for 
a few years now.
In a nutshell, the DSA has announced that it will NOT make CPD compulsory for the time being. There are a number of interesting threads of thought which lead off from this.
I’m in favour of CPD in general, but 99.9% of what “CPD” courses are (or have been) available out there are useless crap! CPD has been devalued by organisations handing out “CPD certificates” like confetti to people for just turning up to regular meetings, where the only item on the agenda is to have a moan about the DSA and discuss how it could be brought down.
I can assure you that that’s not CPD, anymore than Monopoly money is real money!
Anyway, one interesting thought which occurred to me is how much money some people will have wasted paying for this pointless “CPD” in the past. After all, now that it’s not going to be compulsory – no brownie points, no gold stars, no marks out of ten on the check test – all those meetings or lectures on how to do your tax return by people with no qualifications in the subject matter involved, even though you use an accountant, have effectively been made useless.
Another interesting point is how already the very same people who would have slammed the DSA if CPD had been made compulsory are now criticising them because it hasn’t been! These are the kind of people who would have been first in the queue for those “bring down the DSA” meetings in local pubs, and who are always prattling on about the same subject ad nauseam across various web forums.
I also wonder what some of the larger organisations and franchises will do now? Many have issued “CPD certificates” to their members for attending all sorts of meetings and events. A lot of ADIs have been stupid enough to let pupils down in order to attend these things, but it’s all been devalued – even if those certificates had any value to start with.
I always said that until the DSA issued a list of approved courses I wasn’t going to waste my time attending any that cost me money if there wasn’t a decent qualification at the end of it (and I don’t mean like a BTEC (or any similar vocational qualification), which are impossible to fail and aren’t worth the paper they’re written on).
I wonder if those meetings of the right-on brothers in pubs in Northern towns, bitching about the DSA and looking for ways to criticise it for everything, will still go ahead now?