Continuing professional development

Just as for other professions, university lecturers need to continue their personal and professional development. This involves two separate but related things: development as a statistician and development as a teacher.

Universities usually provide courses related to improving teaching skills. New lecturers are usually required to attend several of these during their first two years or so, and may be expected to work towards obtaining a higher education teaching certificate. Other courses are aimed at established lecturers, who are likely to be encouraged to attend at least some each year.

It is also vitally important that lecturers keep up to date with new advances in their subjects as well as maintaining their familiarity with traditional and long-standing techniques. This is true for lecturers in all subjects, certainly not least in statistics which is advancing very rapidly both in terms of new theoretical developments and in terms of applications.

So, as a statistician, a lecturer should engage in the same sorts of CPD activities as other statisticians. These activities can include attending and giving presentations at seminars and conferences, preparing research papers for publication in journals, attending courses on different statistical methods or computer packages, and so on. All of which is really the stuff of normal academic life anyway.