Continuing Professional Development

Continuing Professional Development: supporting you from within and without CILEx

Louise Turner introduces the CILEx Careers Hub - a membership benefit to help shape your legal career, and Melanie Palethorpe describes an online system to manage CPD progress.

About the author
Louise Turner FCILEx is CILEx’s membership manager; and Melanie Palethorpe is the learning and talent development advisor at Michelmores LLP, Exeter

The CILEx Careers Hub
Louise Turner writes:

When I first joined legal practice, I would be called to the office via a pager. I did not have a mobile phone, and certainly did not have the wonder of the worldwide web to Google law reports.

We no longer rely on word of mouth, and use status updates, likes and shares to get the information we need. With information technology moving as fast as ever, we recognise the need to get relevant information and support to our members quickly, and so I introduce to you the CILEx Careers Hub, which is due to launch in spring 2017.

What the Careers Hub will do for you

Let me give you a taster of what the Careers Hub will do for you and why it is a key benefit to your CILEx membership.

The Careers Hub will provide you with professional development resources and tools like CV and cover letter builders, interview simulators, and access to 150 employability skills courses and a job search engine to help you secure qualifying employment in the legal sector. These tools can also be a great way to help you update an old CV if you are thinking of changing jobs or moving to a different area of specialism.

For those already working in the legal sector and looking to climb to the next rung of the ladder, there will be educational and training tools which will help to prepare you for that next step.

If you are looking for ways to illustrate to your firm that you would make a good head of department or partner, or you are thinking of opening your own law firm, then you might find the 150 business skills courses and the business education library at Ashridge Business School invaluable.

For those of you who would like to broaden your knowledge but do not have time to attend additional courses outside the workplace, the e-learning hub will prove very handy. There you will be able to complete courses in an array of subject areas, such as IT, in the comfort of your own home or office.

You will also find bespoke tools on the Careers Hub which will help guide you through some of the CILEx application processes, such as Work-based Learning, Continuing Professional Development or our upcoming Judicial Development Programme.

It will also be a place you can visit to gain extra support, and you might decide to join our online mentoring scheme either as a mentee or by registering yourself as a mentor. Through this scheme, our mentees will be carefully matched with their mentor based on criteria, such as area of specialism, qualification status and geographical location.

The Careers Hub will be customised to meet your individual member needs and signpost you to recommended resources, guidance and support that will assist you in taking your next career steps. Brand new content will be available on the Careers Hub on a regular basis, including current educational articles and legal practice insights.

The Careers Hub will help us to identify your needs better and more quickly. From this information, we can look at trending content and work to deliver more of that content to you in the future. In other words, it will help us to understand what our members want and allow us to enhance your membership journey with CILEx.

We hope that you will use this up-to-the-minute membership benefit to help you achieve your career aspirations with CILEx. Please look out for our ‘go-live date’ in your weekly CILEx Member Newsletter.

How Michelmores' transition to online systems has helped CILEx members with their CPD
Melanie Palethorpe writes:

Like any business, at Michelmores we are always looking for opportunities to streamline processes, work smartly, and give time back to our lawyers. There has been an explosion of learning technologies available in recent years, and we were keen to explore how we could leverage our existing IT systems to work more efficiently and improve access to our numerous learning and development programmes.

MiDevelopment

MiDevelopment, our new online hub where colleagues can manage their development, has really helped us to achieve this. Not only does it allow you to book onto training, the system allows you to capture any form of development that you have undertaken and evaluate it through the system, hence keeping a record of all your development activity and evaluations in one place. It has most definitely helped our lawyers to more efficiently take control of their CPD, and encourages best practice and compliance around reflective practice.

While there is a vast array of products with different functionality available, purchasing an ‘add-on ’ to our newly installed human resources and payroll system seemed the logical choice as colleagues across the firm were familiar with its format and we had an established relationship with the provider. The ‘out-ofthe-box ’ product comes as a very basic package, with the option to design systems and process tailored to a firm’s particular requirements.

CPD support: key priorities

As the majority of colleagues are registered with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, one of our key priorities was to make life as straightforward as possible for solicitors to demonstrate compliance with their new CPD requirements: reflect; plan and address their learning needs; and evaluate and record their development activities. Equally as important was developing a system which catered for the growing number of different professions we have across the firm, one of which being our CILEx members.

We felt it important to understand the needs of the different types of people who would use the system, and set up focus groups and user-testing sessions to ensure that we had fully understood the range of user requirements across the firm. We used this feedback to make changes to the design, resulting in a simple but effective end product. As our second largest lawyer group, CILEx members were key to these discussions as we wanted to make sure that the system complemented their own CPD requirements rather than complicating matters.

CPD and CILEx lawyers

Our CILEx members were very positive about MiDevelopment as they are required to demonstrate that they reflect, plan, act and evaluate their development activities and record them on myCILEx. While myCILEx can be used to log CPD throughout the year, in practice many of the members we spoke to complete it in one go ahead of the deadline. Our CILEx members said that MiDevelopment would be particularly helpful when it came to entering their CPD into myCILEx in September.

Moving to an online system? Go for it!

The individual development reports have also proved a useful tool for team leaders and supervisors in embedding learning. We have received feedback that the information captured in the system equips team leaders to have better quality conversations about how they can support the transfer of learning into practice and further support that person’s development. Team training reports are now regularly being used to inform planning for the year ahead, leading to more targeted use of budget and knowledge sharing opportunities.

As a learning and development team, we are able to report on information in MiDevelopment. As a function, this has arguably been one of the most valuable benefits of investing in the new software. We are already putting the information to good use when designing programmes tailored to colleagues to support their career aspirations and CPD requirements.