It’s finally arrived!  After 9 months of hard work last year and a lot of new experiences and ideas, I have just received news that I have attained Level 3 Accreditation in Learning & Development Practice from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development.

The certificate arrived in the post last week and, as I don’t really have a public office wall upon which to hang my new certificate, I thought I would share the news with you via my blog.

My certificate!

The part-time course was offered by DPG and took place in Birmingham. Over the nine months we covered the following elements:

• Developing coaching skills for the workplace
• Delivering learning & development activities
• Evaluating learning & development activities
• Understanding organisations and the role of learning & development
• Undertaking a Learning Needs Analysis
• Preparing & designing learning & development activities
• Recording, analysing and using learning & development information
• Developing yourself as an effective learning & development practitioner

My associates in the class came from a fascinating range of business backgrounds – a kind of United Nations of the workforce. It is easy to forget how different working cultures can be.  Having worked for many years in the public and heritage sectors, I found it very refreshing and challenging to hear from colleagues in private industry, commerce and professional HR.

In particular, I found their arguments around evaluating value for money and calculating the return on investment of learning in the workplace to be both terrifying (who knew you could do that?!) and invigorating (you can do that! Excellent!).

DPG classmates learning the art of effective poster making during our Demo Sessions Day

We concluded the course in the ninth month by pairing up to present short L&D sessions to each other, to demonstrate what we had learned and to teach each other new ideas.  The climax of our work, these sessions were enormous fun and nerve-wracking at the same time.  I have never spent so long planning a 25 minute session!  On the day however, the delivery of the sessions was  warm and reassuring – we wanted each other to succeed and although we had all learned the same techniques, we played the game, opened our minds and learned a lot.

I know the experience has already improved my own practice.  In the middle of delivering 2 sessions on Community Archives Management, I learned new Brain-Friendly Learning techniques which made the second session much more interactive and engaging.  How do I know that?  I remembered to ask for evaluation feedback and used assessment and monitoring methods learned on the course.

I look forward to continuing to apply and develop what I have learned on the CIPD course and promise to post updates here.