The Ontological Choreography of Continuing Professional Development: A Mixed-Methods Study of Continuing Professional...

Reports have forecast significant changes ahead for Continuing Professional Development (CPD). With new models on the horizon, CPD developers will require additional knowledge and training. Our objective was to learn how CPD leaders and developers came into their roles, if they are engaged in scholarship and the challenges and opportunities in pursuing scholarship.

We conducted a mixed grounded theory study, inviting CPD leaders within our institution for interviews focused on career paths, CPD and scholarly activities, networks, and supports and challenges. We invited 405 program/conference directors from our institution to participate in a survey focused on similar themes. We used the framework of ontological choreography in our final analysis.

We conducted 13 interviews and had a survey response rate of 28.6% (n = 116). We identified three themes: (1) the pathway to becoming an expert in CPD planning and delivery is often unplanned, unclear, and uncredentialed; (2) CPD is undervalued as a field, with inadequate time and funding allocated; and (3) engagement with scholarship is variable while identifying resources to support scholarship is difficult.

Beyond the usual calls for CPD to be more appropriately recognized and valued, this article offers another way to explore why past visions of the future have not been fully realized; CPD means different things to different people; it is ontologically different even across a single network in a single faculty.