Continued professional development must be advanced

Continued professional development must be advanced

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.