In any profession, keeping up with the latest trends and practices in the relevant industry is vital in ensuring that you are constantly improving your capabilities within your job role. For businesses, investing in the professional development of their staff ensures that they continue to remain effective in their roles, which positively contributes to the overall operation of the business. More and more large businesses are now adopting strategies for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to ensure that their staff are able to improve their skill sets and also get official recognition for doing so.

The new App from AXELOS has all the tools you need to control your own CPD

Whichever sector you’re working in, having the structure of a CPD programme enables you to understand the skills you need and to plan how you can develop these skills and receive the relevant accreditations for them. To make sure a CPD programme is being used to its full potential, it’s essential that employers get behind it and with a huge amount of benefits to an organisation, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t. From ensuring that employers are as effective as they can be in their roles, to helping identify and address skill gaps, it’s a win-win situation for any business. A structured programme will ensure clear direction for both the business and its staff, so that they know what they can achieve and what they need to do to get there.

AXELOS' Professional Development Programme

One of our clients here at MMT Digital are AXELOS, a joint venture company, created by the Cabinet Office on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) in the United Kingdom, and Capita plc to run the Global Best Practice portfolio. AXELOS have an unmatched portfolio of products, including ITIL®, PRINCE2®, and RESILIATM.  We have worked with AXELOS on a range of projects, including a Partner Portal for their Accredited Training Organisations and their main web platform AXELOS.com. The most recent of these was the launch of their first comprehensive professional development programme which is aligned to the AXELOS global best practice frameworks - ITIL®, PRINCE2® and MSP®. Through the application, members can access and store a range of AXELOS resources, take assessments and log their progress. The application clearly outlines the types of training that AXELOS offer and how they relate to different roles in various industry sectors. The aim of the new programme is to enable individuals to carry out training and assessments themselves. This in turn will benefit businesses by giving their employees a structured way of improving their skill set and the ability to gain recognition for their achievements.  

What we did…

The application required a number of complex integrations and we managed to successfully implement these while presenting a seamless user experience so that members do not notice as they switch between the CPD application and the search and content functionality that sits within the platform. We first developed an online store which was needed to allow members to purchase the various resources from AXELOS, this was then integrated with the application so that members could browse, purchase and store the resources in their account, all through the same application. As well as the online store, we also successfully integrated the application with a Learning Record Store, this means that any activities that members complete are stored in an open-source LRS. 

The Digital Badge 

Something which is incorporated into the CPD application is the Digital Badge, this is something which signifies learning achievements in a way that can be easily verified and shared online. It is becoming more widely recognised in the UK and with today’s job market as competitive as it is, recruiters and employers can use it to validate credentials and it can act as a differentiator between candidates. We integrated with third party open badge site Acclaim to enable members to be awarded their digital badge once they’ve completed an accreditation. They can then add the badge to their AXELOS community profile as well as professional networking sites like LinkedIn. 

It’s not an easy task to incorporate a structure for CPD into an organisation with employees having different expectations and needs, the introduction of AXELOS’ Professional Development Programme enables members to be in control of their own development, making the process a lot easier for both sides. You can find out more about the Professional Development Programme here.