You’ve completed all your prerequisite learning and have your full PT Diploma. Such reverence and pride last briefly as someone comes along with this little question:
“What will you be doing for your yearly CPD?”
Talk about deflating, especially when you thought education was finally finished. Truth be told, many of us have felt like this because the need for CPD (Continued Professional Development) can seem a little inconvenient, especially when you’ve already made a large investment into becoming a qualified fitness professional.
Questions like these begin to fill your mind:
Put simply; continued development is crucial to longevity in any element of life.
The great thing about this style of up-skilling is that you’ve got the power to choose what you spend your time doing and invest in mastering. Unlike school, you don’t need to take a course that’s not of interest on a personal or professional level. As such, it allows you to create a niche for your business. This makes what you do highly valuable to people, which means you can also offer them an unforgettable level of service and experience.
Now the overall gist has been covered; we shall delve into the common questions in more depth.
To become the best possible fitness professional you can (that is the short answer). You will also find that taking extra courses
allow you to expand your perspective, which usually allows you to help more people.
One benefit of ongoing self-improvement in your chosen field of expertise is that you become the person everyone sees as the ‘go-to’ for that specific skill set; it truly sets you apart from the average trainer you may find yourself in competition with.
It also shows that you care about keeping your knowledge relevant and of a high standard too. The real way to look at this question is not ‘Why do you need CPD?’; it’s ‘Why do you feel that you don’t?’
There are only two reasons you wouldn’t need CPD:
Yes, and you’ll be amazed at how many high-quality ones are available to you.
and so many more! You will even find that there are courses in the form of webinars, online lectures with supporting questions/resources or even longer courses that have case study elements in them.
A great question to ask yourself is this: Why does this interest me, and how will it be a benefit?
You can take a course for many reasons:
CPD should be a pleasure, not a chore, so choose wisely.
All of the above brings us to the main consideration for most trainers…
Short answer: potentially.
Just because you’ve done a course, it doesn’t automatically mean you can skyrocket your prices (although having some well-respected certifications to your name can certainly do that, provided you apply their knowledge from them).
You see, knowledge is one side of the coin, and application is the other. Gaining specialist (or even general) qualifications does warrant a fee increase. You’d be wise, however, to consider applying that to new clients only and, as a token of good faith, keep older clients at their existing fees.
The reasons are simple:
An extensive repertoire of CPD courses successfully completed will also open doors moving forwards and provide a lot of potential opportunities you’d perhaps have missed without the investment. You can see the full range of CPD Courses that Future Fit has to offer here.