What Counts as Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?

If you have professional development hours to complete, you may assume you need to take another technical course related directly to your profession. Well, not necessarily.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) can include learning that helps you maintain, improve or expand the skills you use in your professional work. Depending on your profession and professional organization, that can include subjects such as problem-solving, communication, leadership, technology, professional practice — and creative thinking and innovation.

A creativity course is not automatically eligible simply because it is called professional development. For many professionals, learning how to think differently, solve difficult problems and develop better solutions can have a clear connection to professional practice.

A creativity course needs to be well structured and relevant to the realities of professional practice. Check your professional association’s requirements, including subject relevance, activity categories, reporting rules and any limits on eligible hours.

What is considered continuing professional development?

CPD is the ongoing learning professionals undertake after completing their initial education or training.

The purpose is straightforward: to keep developing the knowledge and skills needed to practise effectively.

Depending on the profession, CPD may include:

• Courses and workshops
• Conferences and seminars
• Webinars and online training
• Structured workplace learning
• Mentoring or coaching
• Professional practice training
• Technical education
• Ethics and professional responsibility
• Communication and leadership development
• New technology and changing practices
• Problem-solving and other transferable professional skills

So CPD is broader than simply "learning more technical information" and the specific rules differ considerably between professions.

Can creativity count as CPD?

It may, when the learning develops competencies relevant to your work and meets your regulator’s or professional organization’s requirements. Creativity in a professional setting is not about learning to paint, write poetry or become an artist.

It can mean learning how to:

• Approach a difficult problem from another angle
• Challenge assumptions
• Generate alternative solutions
• Break habitual thinking patterns
• Reframe a problem
• Develop and evaluate new ideas
• Find better ways of working
• Adapt when the obvious solution does not work

These are practical skills.

Consider an engineer facing a design constraint. The technical knowledge may tell them what is possible. Creative thinking can help them find a different way of approaching the constraint.

A lawyer dealing with a complicated matter may know the relevant law but still need to find a new way to frame the client's problem.

A manager trying to improve a broken process may need more than another management theory. They may need a way to generate alternatives they had not previously considered.

That is where creativity becomes professional development rather than an abstract "soft skill."

Creativity and innovation are professional skills

Creativity and innovation are related, but they are not the same thing.

Creative thinking helps you generate new and useful possibilities.

Innovation is about putting useful ideas into practice.

A professional does not need to choose between analytical thinking and creative thinking. The two can work together.

You can use evidence, technical expertise, professional judgment and established rules while still asking:

Is there another way to approach this?

That question can be valuable when a familiar solution is no longer working.

This is particularly relevant for professionals working in fields where problems are complex and the answer is rarely obvious.

Why creativity can be relevant to engineers

Engineering is often associated with mathematics, science, design standards and technical knowledge. Those remain essential. But engineers also encounter problems where the first technically sound approach is not necessarily the best practical solution.

Creative problem-solving can have a legitimate professional connection when the learning supports the engineer's practice and satisfies the applicable CPD rules.

Why creativity can be relevant to lawyers

Legal work is highly analytical, but that does not make it purely linear.

Lawyers routinely have to interpret complicated information, identify issues, develop arguments, advise clients and find practical solutions to problems.

Creative thinking can support these activities by helping professionals:

• Look at a problem from multiple perspectives
• Identify assumptions
• Generate alternative approaches
• Reframe difficult problems
• Develop new ways to communicate an argument
• Find practical options for clients

What about innovation training?

Innovation can also be relevant to professional development when it is connected to the work you actually do.

For example, innovation training might teach professionals how to:

• Identify opportunities for improvement
• Generate and compare possible solutions
• Test new approaches
• Challenge established assumptions
• Turn ideas into practical changes
• Evaluate whether a new idea actually creates value

These skills can apply across many professional environments. An engineer might use them to improve a design process. A lawyer might use them to rethink how a recurring client problem is handled. A manager might use them to redesign an inefficient workflow. A scientist might use them to approach a research problem differently.

The profession changes, but the underlying thinking skills can remain relevant and useful.

What should you look for in a CPD course?

If you are choosing professional development training, don't look only at the number of hours.

Ask three questions:

Is the subject relevant to my work?

A useful CPD course should have a clear connection to the skills you use or need to develop professionally.

Does it teach something I can actually use?

A certificate has limited value if you forget everything the moment the course ends.

Look for practical methods, examples, exercises and ideas you can apply to real problems.

Does the provider give you documentation?

Find out whether you will receive a certificate or other evidence showing what you completed and how many hours you spent learning.

A different kind of professional development

Creative Expert Hub's How to Think Creatively and Innovate at Work course is designed specifically around this idea.

It is a 7-hour, self-paced professional-development course that teaches professionals how to apply creative thinking to real work situations. The course includes examples from law, engineering, business, science and medicine and provides a certificate of completion showing 7 hours of continuous professional training.

The focus is not on becoming "more artistic." It is on becoming better at thinking when the obvious answer is not enough.

That means learning how to recognize mental habits, generate different possibilities, approach problems from new angles and turn useful ideas into practical improvements.

Explore the How to Think Creatively and Innovate at Work course

Choosing CPD that supports your practice

Continuing Professional Development is not simply about accumulating hours. It is about continuing to develop the capabilities you need to do your professional work well.

For many professionals, creativity and innovation can be part of that development because modern professional problems often require more than technical knowledge alone.