Anyone who remembers a Teacher Training Day giving you a day off school as a child is already familiar with one benefit of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) training for teachers! But there are more meaningful merits of CPD training to those working on the other side of the equation.
Good teachers depend on good CPD to advance their careers, and schools will almost always provide it to all their permanent staff. However, supply teachers and flexible teaching staff may find it harder to benefit from accessible CPD opportunities.
This is why it’s so important for supply staff, flexible workers and teachers currently jobhunting to work with a staffing agency that provides certified CPD to candidates. Every teacher deserves to be able to build up their skills and advance their career.
Here are a just a few reasons why CPD training will advance your teaching career.
1. CPD training puts you an advantage
Jobhunting as a supply or flexible teacher is a competitive affair. With so many teachers competing for an unstable number of positions, distinguishing features on a CV are worth a premium.
If you have a good number of CPD training certificates under your belt, you will put yourself at a competitive advantage in the eyes of decision makers at your dream school. After all, an employer will be more likely to pick the teacher with a proven set of skills in, say, Child Protection or lesson planning than one who provides only their word to go on.
2. CPD training makes you a more effective teacher
Even more importantly than its benefit to your employment prospects, CPD training can have a hugely positive impact on your abilities as a teacher.
Teaching is a holistic art that requires an eclectic range of skills. If you’re a GCSE History teacher, knowing the ins and outs of the Battle of Stalingrad will probably be pretty essential. But you should also have a useful apparatus for navigating some common yet sensitive aspects of your pupils’ lives, like Anxiety and Depression, Dyslexia or ADHD.
Expanding your wheelhouse of teaching skills with CPD training will make a positive impact where it matters most; to the children you teach.
3. CPD training keeps your teaching knowledge current
As a discipline, teaching moves at pace. With so much research taking place in and outside the classroom across however many schools of thought, it’s not hard for your average jobbing schoolteacher to fall a bit behind with the latest academic developments in theory and best practice.
CPD training gives you a chance to escape the immediate pressures of the job and get to grips with the most current thinking about teaching. This will only serve to make you a more dynamic teacher when you return to classrooms, while also bolstering that all-important competitive advantage we touched on in the first point.
4. CPD training helps you love teaching even more
It isn’t hard for teachers to feel a little frayed around the edges sometimes. Far too many teachers are plagued by burnout and stress. But even those nowhere near the end of their tether can fall into a bit of a rut of teaching the same things in the same way.
A fresh dose every now and then of practical information and unfamiliar perspectives can help you feel more dynamic again. Think how good it will feel to wow a Year 5 cover class with a method of teaching Maths that they have simply never experienced before. Those are the kind of moments that make people go into teaching in the first place.
CPD Training is a vital means for supply and flexible teachers to improve their employment prospects, expand their skills, stay up to date with the profession and inject some joy into their job. Sadly, many educational recruitment agencies still do not offer these courses to their candidates.
All Protocol Education candidates have access to heavily discounted CPD certified courses. To start finding work while developing your credentials, all you have to do is register with us.
