The CPD (Continuing Professional Development) conundrum

Live

Yet another workday is behind you. Dinner’s done and now is the time to catch up on your social / professional network updates. Surfing through LinkedIn, you see quite a few digital badges on your colleagues’ profiles proclaiming the super powers they have earned, guilt tripping you into re-evaluating the merit of your affinity for the couch, television and that big bag of crunchy snacks. Ouch, that hurts!!!

Die

Depression-cum-rage fuelled overdrive powers you to spend the next three whole weeks scouting for a program that will imbibe you with life-altering and earth-shattering skills. Soon enough you realise that the complexity of choosing a ‘Venti Iced Skinny Hazelnut Macchiato, Sugar-Free Syrup, Extra Shot, Light Ice, No Whip’ at Starbucks pales in comparison to the maze that continuing education is. Those MBA degrees which your colleague’s colleague did to pole vault from a lowly ‘VP-of-something at someplace’ to a snazzy ‘Chief-Officer of something at some or the other place’ come loaded with a surfeit of options, such as:

• 100% on-campus to 100% online;

• In the company of wide-eyed hopefuls (Regular batch) or stone-cold realists (Executive batch);

• Those requiring a GMAT / GRE to ones requiring nothing more than your cheque;

• Durations ranging from ‘Blink-and-it-is-completed’ to ‘Graduate-with-your-kid’ number of years;

• Specialisation options such as ‘Advanced Binary Computing’, ‘Xponentiate Your Zen’ and everything in between;

• Costs ranging from a few hundred grand to ‘sell-your-kidney / mortgage-your-life-for-next-20-years’ kind of stuff.

To navigate through these options, you choose to take help of some college and / or programme ranking tools, only to find out that their quantum and complexity have spawned a related sub-industry which ranks these ranking tools as per their methodology and reliability. Undeterred, you plough through and somehow manage to zero-in on the MBA programme you want to pursue.

Alas, that given programme has already completed its intake for the current batch a day before you arrived at your conclusion and the next intake is scheduled a year later. However, you are not the type that resigns to its fate, are you? So you move on, determined to enroll for that course next year, all satisfied with the perseverance shown in the past three weeks to shake off the stupor; deep dive into your career assessment and emerge with a plan for the future.

Repeat

As days and weeks roll by, work and personal responsibilities regain their pre-eminence in your daily schedule. While you might be initially tight lipped about your MBA plans for next year, rest assured that by end of the quarter your MBA aspirations and whether or not you will actually live those are being heatedly debated and placed bets on in pubs around the world.

None of this is still actually going to deter you from your plans. Until one day, some months later, when the company sends you on one of those mandatory ‘spend-or-lose-your-budget’ training sessions. Over there, speaking with other participants you realise that your chosen MBA programme is so very passé. Doubts start to creep in your mind about the choice made. Surely, these many people can't be wrong, right? After all, it is a major investment of your time, efforts, money and so on – surely a revisit on this topic won’t be a bad idea. And so you revisit it.

Your hunch turns out to be right. Recent news articles, contemporary anecdotes, advices from well-wishers all point to not doing that programme, nay actually a step further imploring you to just chill. After all, you have come so far on your merits and that should be enough to see you through for the rest of your career. You give in – your inner Garfield coaxing you to reach out for that couch with the TV remote in your hands.

Life moves on.

Days go by, until – yet another workday is behind you. Dinner’s done and now is the time to catch up on your social / professional network updates……........