Recommendations for Improving NZAC’s Continuing Professional Development Process

Abstract

NZAC’s Continuing Professional Development Record and Plan (CPDR+P) is a member’s annual listing of continuing professional development (CPD) activities and self-reflection on those activities, and a yearly plan that targets areas for further development. The focus of the process is a self-reflective practice of reviewing and reflecting on new learning. Surprisingly, demonstrating one’s effectiveness with clients does not feature. Since research has shown that traditional CPD activities are not consistently related to improved client outcomes, a more meaningful process of CPDR+P should have as one of its major aims the counsellor’s “…steady improvement over time to achieve superior performance on some meaningful [outcome] measure” (Goodyear et al., p. 54). This article suggests a rebalancing of the current self-reflection focus in NZAC’s CPDR+P to include counsellors’ collecting and analysing information about their client caseload and progress in counselling in order to answer three questions:
(1) Who am I dealing with?
(2) How well am I dealing with them? and
(3) How effectively am I dealing with them? Recommended changes to the CPDR+P process are discussed.