7 Top Tips to Make the Most of your Veterinary CPD
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is an essential part of veterinary practice. It helps ensure professionals keep up to date with the latest industry developments, whilst improving knowledge and skills to provide the best possible care for their patients. The RCVS recognises this, requiring that vets complete 35 hours of veterinary CPD each year (with nurses having to complete 15 hours). But, whether you’re a vet or a veterinary nurse, it’s important to make sure your CPD isn’t just a tick-box exercise. So how can you make the most of your CPD time?
Planning your veterinary CPD
Having a planned approach to CPD is an important and exciting part of your career progression. It will help you to identify your development needs, and focus your learning. It also means you can spend any CPD budget available to you wisely and reduces the need for stressful last-minute cramming at the end of the year! A good habit to get into is keeping a note of cases you found stressful to help when you’re planning your next year’s CPD – it’s easy to think of areas we enjoy, but far harder to remember back to a stressful case that might have been made easier with extra skills or knowledge.
Choosing CPD courses and providers
Once you’ve decide what you’re going to learn next year, and how much you need to do, it’s time to think about where and how you’re going to learn. Do you want a short practical course to boost your skills or learn a new procedure, or do you want a postgraduate qualification that gives you postnominals and a real career boost? Do you learn best studying face-to-face in a classroom, or is flexibility to learn at your leisure important to you? Deciding what your learning style is can help as well.
Logging and reflecting on your veterinary CPD
The RCVS mandates that veterinary professionals log their CPD with 1CPD, and then reflect on their learning. This last part often catches people out – it can feel like a lot more work! Our CPD reflection tips and prompts can help with any last-minute CPD reflection problems! Remember, you can reflect on the type of learning you did, as well as the content – maybe write a couple of sentences about whether the learning style suited you, or whether you’re planning to follow up with a more extensive course.
More veterinary CPD planning tips
We understand that organising your CPD can be a daunting task, especially when you are juggling a busy work schedule. We’re experts in helping people with their veterinary CPD needs, so we have put together our 7 Top Tips guide which should help you to plan your learning more effectively. You can get it for free below!
