An Education and Training Toolkit for the New Millennium?

SUMMARY

In this paper, I would like to present a personal overview, pointing to ways in which education and training in general, and effective continuing professional development in particular, may be delivered as we move into the next millennium. Continuing professional development should be about much more than equipping professional people with a licence to practice in their field, it should also equip them to be able to develop themselves as autonomous learners, so that they can continue to adapt to the rapid pace of change in the modern world. Continuing professional development is nothing without learning, and one objective in this paper is to try to remind readers that the processes whereby effective learningis achieved change very slowly indeed, and that renewed attention to the quality of learning may be the bridge to harness the power of the variety of delivery mechanisms that now exist, to equip professional people and others for work and life in the next millennium. My principal objective, however, is to remind readers that the range of terms and acronyms in the world of continuing education, lifelong learning and training should be regarded as representing a toolkit, rather than a series of separate compartments, and that educators and trainers need to be successful general practitionersin their application of this toolkit to continuing professional development, rather than specialists or consultants in the use of narrow areas of the toolkit. To this end, I have interrogated some of the tools in the toolkit, to help explain how can they be used togetherto help us meet the needs of the next millennium.