The year in CPD: 2024-25
What is CPD?
CPD is short for ‘continuing professional development’ (or sometimes ‘continuous professional development). It’s basically how professionals stay up to date with developments in their field, whether that’s the latest technology, research, trends in professional practice, etc.
For translators, we have something of a double CPD obligation – to continue to provide the highest quality of service to our clients, we have to stay up to date on the way in which translation is performed (including technological evolutions), but we also have to make sure we keep our knowledge of the areas we translate in sharp. In other words, we have to maintain our translation skills and our subject knowledge skills.
Many professional membership bodies recommend (or mandate) members to complete a certain number of hours of CPD per year. I am a fully qualified member of two such bodies, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) and the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL), both of which recommend 30 hours of CPD per year. I actually tend to do rather more than that…
As you an see, I completed more than 175 hours of CPD in the 2024/25 year (May-April). Almost half of that was specialist subject knowledge, and the other half consisted mostly of ‘contributing to the profession’ (doing things like contributing to the ITI’s review of its code of conduct) and ‘translation skills’ (mostly in the form of a revision club).
Regular readers of the blog will know that I post a monthly summary of the specialist knowledge CPD I’ve done. But with the CPD year having ended in May, I thought I’d take the chance to look back over the year and pick out a few highlights and sessions that I would particularly recommend catching up on, if you have the time.
So without further ado, here we go…
Deutschsprachig / German-language
Auf dem Weg zu Netto-Null: Die Rolle österreichischer Wälder (Glacier)
[On the Road to Net Zero: The Role of Austria’s Forests]
Recording: https://glacier.eco/resources/webinar-auf-dem-weg-zu-netto-null
Part of my ongoing commitment to absorbing subject knowledge in the languages I translate from as well as English, This was a really interesting webinar about Tree.ly, a company committed to protecting Europe’s forests (in this case, particularly in Austria) through selling carbon-offset credits. The speaker addressed the issues with carbon credits head-on and explained why their approach (focusing on local, traceable, auditable projects and only issuing credits for a year at a time, based on an annual assessment of the ongoing benefits of the projects) helps to remedy some of those issues. This sounds like the way forward to me.
Psychologie und Klimawandel – Ein individuell-kognitiver Blick auf ein globales Problem (FernUniversität in Hagen)
[Psychology and climate change – an individual-cognitive perspective on a global problem]
Recording: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/forschung/schwerpunkte/eun/aktuelles-termine/videos/video-Fischer.shtml
This was quite a content-heavy presentation, this time focusing on various psychological models and how they affect the way individuals think about climate change through a metacognitive lens. There were a few messages, but one that came back time and again was that the climate “debate” has become highly politicised, and that this politicisation affects the way people think about the problem – this isn’t a surprise of course, but it’s useful to have the scientific evidence. It also concluded that an individual’s level of metacognitive abilities can be used as a predictor of their views about climate change and the threat it poses. Metacognition was found to be much better (in other words, people were better able to judge their own level of knowledge about a topic) when assessing non-political information than when dealing with political information. It also looked at some of the practical implications, like the effectiveness of infographics.
Francophone / French-language
Biodiversité & CSRD : quelles méthodes et outils pour le secteur agroalimentaire et agricole ? (Agrosolutions
[Biodiversity & CSRD: what methods and tools are available for the agri-food and agricultural sector?]
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=_V9iiGPbtzQ
A dense but comprehensive webinar about what the process of reporting on biodiversity looks for companies, and when it will become mandatory for different companies under CSRD. One thing that always emerges from these sorts of webinars is how trying to implement a relatively simple idea like “Let’s have more information on how companies are affecting biodiversity” inevitably becomes a sprawling network of tools, standards and datasets, and above all, a nightmare for reporting organisations, particularly small ones.
Regards croisés sur le vivant – La Santé des sols (MSHSud)
[Intersecting views on the living world – soil health]
Recording: https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/msh-sud/regards-croises-sur-le-vivant-en-societe-2023-2024-ep01
I heard about this talk after attending a related talk in September by one of the speakers, Alain Brauman, though I haven’t included it in this list, as I cannot find any recording of it to share. This talk was similarly fascinating, and – perhaps unsurprisingly, being given at a French academic institution – also quite abstract. The topic was again the question of how exactly we should think about soil health: What does it mean for a soil to be healthy? The speakers argued for going beyond a purely functional understanding of soil health, i.e. the condition we need it to be in to fulfil a particular purpose, and taking a broader perspective on the notion of health.
English-language
Implementation Science (IES EPIC)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNfyYpzZjxs
This webinar started by looking at the origins and goals of implementation science, which originated in the medical field as a way of applying a rigorous analysis to the successful deployment of policy. It then moved on to what this might mean for implementing environmental policy as part of a new project being launched by the Institution of Environmental Science (IES). What was really interesting about this session was its goal to open a new conversation and a new perspective, asking where members may want the IES to focus its efforts in the new project.
Making sense of environmental problems: using systems thinking approaches (Institution of Environmental Studies)
Recording: https://www.the-ies.org/analysis/making-sense-environmental
This was a really interesting talk on systems thinking, demonstrated using the example of the impact of chicken farming on the River Wye. I’ve never studied systems thinking formally, but one thing that particularly attracts me about it is how visual it is, and the speaker Bryan Hopkins really leaned into this, showing some of the diagrams he would use to elaborate and elucidate the systems in place impacting the River Wye and how it has reached the state it is in. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to start making my own diagrams, but it’s definitely something I want to look into more.
Behaviour change for biodiversity conservation: An update! (Institution of Environmental Sciences)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeEiQ-njvwE
I love to see interdisciplinarity in action, and this webinar was a great example. It talked about taking the principles of behaviour change, what we might call an area of psychology or organisation studies, and applied it to environmental science. It looked at some really interesting examples of where these principles had been put into action to achieve certain goals, such as reducing killing of wildlife and the illegal wildlife trade routes. It got a bit technical, so I won’t try to summarise the detail here, but it’s worth a watch!
Biodiversity science for 2030 - knowledge needs to support action to reach the targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework (Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KkuqfzPrOU
This was quite a content-heavy webinar, hardly surprising given that it set out to answer three huge questions:
How do we gather the evidence that we are making progress towards national and global biodiversity goals?
How do we assemble a global biodiversity observing system that is fit for purpose?
How do we apply biodiversity science to guide action to achieve connectivity targets by 2030?
I won’t try to summarise the answers to all of these questions here. Instead, I will simply say that the webinar looked at some really interesting and innovative ways of assessing the current status of biodiversity around the world, then turned to some of the geopolitical and organisational aspects of assembling a system for gathering the necessary data.
Food Nutrition and Farming – What’s the Connection? (Soil Association)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsSVUecaQIs
There was a lot of information packed into this webinar, and I’m sure I’ll need to go back to it in the future. But the overall message is that organic/regenerative/acroecological (etc.) farming produces food with a broader nutrient spectrum than intensive, chemical-based farming. This is turn produces better general health outcomes for the humans consuming those products, though the differences are so broad that it is difficult to isolate individual nutritional differences between the products to draw clear conclusions about correlation and causation. More research and evidence is required to support some of the claims made. We need to move way from siloed approaches to agriculture that focus purely on, e.g. rewilding and carbon sequestration, and instead consider the system as a whole, allowing us to move from “chemical intensity” to “knowledge intensity” in our agriculture.
Wetland Creation (Scalgo)
Recording: https://scalgo.com/en-US/webinars/wetland-creation
This was quite a technical webinar – the kind of thing I love to attend in order to really understand how the people I work for are thinking. It was a webinar of two halves, the first demonstrating the platform Scalgo Live, which is a high-resolution terrain model available for various countries that can be used to plan interventions and model what that might do to the landscape – in this case, how creating interventions to slow water flow and create wetlands will affect things like flow speed within and beyond the intervention area. The second half was then a practical demonstration, using the example of creating a wetland on a farm to minimise the risk of flooding.
Decarbonisation and electrification: are they really quieter? (Institution of Environmental Sciences)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVd11B1z1So
This was a really interesting whistle-stop tour of four different areas (electric vehicles, renewable energy, air source heat pumps and data centres) to explore what the science tells us about whether the decarbonised/electrified versions are really quieter. The answer is broadly that the sorts of noises they make are different, but not actually any quieter. And as with all areas of the transition, the earlier you involve experts in the design process, the more effective the mitigation and the cheaper.
Integrated water management and economic growth (IES FWR)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X91BzI7nWcY
This was quite a ‘technical’ webinar, but it certainly offered a radical perpsective! Its goal was to emphasise that proper water management is essential to economic growth, not an impediment. As many others have said, there has been systemic underinvestment in these sorts of systems for years, and this needs to be rapidly reversed if we are to stave off the potential economic damage that may result in the near future. The speaker gave 7 recommendations for achieving this. I won’t try to summarise these now, but the recording is available for anyone interested in hearing what those recommendations are.