Bolstering continued professional development

Simon Marcus Gower, Executive Principal, High/Scope Indonesia School, Jakarta

The concept of continued professional development (or CPD) is well and long established in many countries. It has become so much a part of professional life that many organizations, when recruiting, will quite naturally specifically look for a potential employee's previous commitment to CPD.

Companies have come to realize that one of their greatest assets is their human resource and so they have become more circumspect in adding to their human resources and they have entered into programs and seminars that explicitly target human resource development.

There is, however, a tendency for human resource development programs and CPD to be misunderstood and ultimately not taken seriously enough. For example, a typical response or observation regarding professional development might be -- that most people just think of it as time off from work; and that they just do not seem to think of it as an important part of their professional lives.

Sadly, this is not only a problem for companies based in Indonesia. European-based companies too have similar experiences. For example, employees attending team-building retreats consistently look upon such activities with skepticism and the genuinely constructive experiences that they may have in learning of greater teamwork are generally lost in practically child-like giggling. But gradually people in the West are becoming more used to this kind of input into their professional lives and it is having a more lasting beneficial effect.

In Indonesia, though, the tales of professional training and improvement programs often remain woeful. Many Jabotabek-based companies utilize villas in Puncak as venues for their training events; but it is all too apparent that the "trainees" attending these events do not take them seriously enough.

Again, often childish laughter and play is far more in evidence than any serious concentration on learning and professional development. Ultimately, such training efforts tend to deteriorate into "having fun" events that may allow people to get to know each other a little better but do very little for their professional betterment.

These kinds of weak training experiences are, then, quite common amongst business companies. Perhaps this can be understood because, after all, most of the people attending such workshops and seminars are educated people already active in a field of employment and so some degree of complacency inevitably grows as they feel they have put learning and study behind them and, in some cases, they have left learning and education some years behind them. Of course, such complacency cannot really be excused but under such circumstances it can perhaps be understood.

However, there are certain "professionals" in whom such complacency can neither be excused nor understood or even forgiven. Regrettably, though, education professionals are equally culpable when it comes to being inattentive with, and poorly committed to, continuing professional development.

Many schools in Indonesia have shown their commitment to the development of their staff by, for example, being willing to provide them with tuition in learning the English language. But this kind of commitment from the employers does not always meet with a positive response. One headmistress of a Jakarta school noted that "if we left it as a voluntary and purely optional part of a teacher's school time, I'm sure very few of my teachers would bother to attend. Because of this we have made it compulsory for all teachers to attend a minimum number of sessions in each academic year."

Compulsory training and CPD, then, becomes an option for employers to at least pursue better performance and skills from their staff. However, by making it compulsory alone does not offer any guarantee that results will be achieved and the staff will be maintaining higher and current standards. It is very clear that employers need to monitor and encourage the achievement of results from their training and developing staff.

Again, examples of education professionals illustrate the point. When sent to attend a seminar given by an American speaker on the latest teaching methods and strategies for primary level school kids, a group of fifteen teachers showed disappointing results. Not one of them had managed to take notes during the presentation and so any feedback from them was sketchy at best and almost entirely anecdotal.

They had, in effect, viewed the event as an escape from their daily teaching routines and even began the day with a mentality that questioned the validity of their attendance. One or two of them suggested along the way that "this American's methods will not apply to us in Indonesia". Both a sad starting point and a sad end result here then.

From another training event for teachers the Australian trainer gained an almost comical experience. The topic for her presentation was "strategies for working with and encouraging problem students", but as it turned out it was not easy for her to get her message across.

The teachers were a problem and difficult to control. They would constantly chatter amongst themselves as she made her presentation and by the end of the seminar she found that she was actually applying some of the strategies she had worked out for students on these "difficult to control" teachers.

Some schools have made significant expenditures on their staff by sending them to Singapore to attend conferences and build relationships with their counterparts in Singapore.

But the return on this expenditure does not seem to be great. Staff members return without being required to present and share their experiences and so they may only pass on their experiences through informal chats. Any useful documentation or observations that they may have collected in Singapore only remain in their personal possession rather than being shared and learnt from by others too.

Clearly, then, professional people in Indonesia need to develop a better appreciation for their own continued professional development and indeed their shared responsibility to develop as a team with other people.

This kind of personal and shared commitment to development is not always easy to achieve but if it can be achieved its benefits are, almost certainly, going to prove infinite. Sharing and good communication multiplies effectiveness and to enhance schools, and indeed any organization orientated towards quality and improvement, continuing professional development is an essential.

The opinions expressed above are personal.