By Louise Han, Chair, Standing Committee on Professional Development (SCPD)
Behind the SCPD program: how we build a year of events
When I stepped into the SCPD chair role this year, one of my first jobs was to divide the year’s programming into themed quarters. Alongside my then co-chair, Ben Dorman, we landed on 4 areas: editing for accessibility, technical skills, preparing members for the accreditation exam and genre editing. The themes were shaped by feedback from branch professional development officers and other SCPD members, as well as direct requests from IPEd members.
What we hadn’t quite anticipated was how much of an ever-shifting landscape professional development scheduling for IPEd would turn out to be. As the accreditation exam evolved to become more accessible – moving to a new 3-part online format this year – we found ourselves adjusting other events around the revised calendar. Presenter availability adds another layer: a presenter we approach in February might not have a free slot until August. It’s also worth remembering that not everything comes from SCPD: branches deliver their own training based on the feedback they receive locally, addressing what they see as valuable to their members, and that work enriches professional development across IPEd as a whole. More broadly, SCPD has tried to steer towards developing more workshops this year, though we’ll deliver speaker presentations too where it makes sense for us to be the ones running them.
From the outside, it can look like some topics have had more attention than others, but we’ve taken care to give every theme a balanced amount of time on the calendar across the full year.
Technical skills has had 4 sessions on the calendar, 3 already delivered this year: Jemma Pollari’s WordPress website-building workshop, Rita Forbes and Christina Howell’s Stream Deck workshop, and Jennifer Yankopoulos and Paul Beverley’s popular macros series. Justine Dixon Cooper AE’s 2-part Plain as a Peacock workshop on plain English editing will be running 1 and 8 December.
Preparing for the accreditation exam got an early boost this year from Linda Nix AE’s 2-part grammar refresher workshop, delivered right at the start of the year on 31 January. Accessibility brings Julie Ganner AE and Agata Mrva-Montoya’s speaker presentation on the second edition of Books without barriers, along with a series of accessibility-focused mini-workshops still to come. Genre editing is represented by Susan Pierotti AE’s webinar and workshop on life writing, and by Renée Otmar DE’s life writing sessions: an introduction to editing life writing, followed by a two-part intermediate masterclass. And business development includes Jane Friedman’s session on building a freelance business.
That’s not even the whole program.
We also brought in more international presenters this year. As I noticed the conversation across editing circles shifting toward the changes facing our industry, I started wondering what we could learn from overseas – recognising that much of the disruption caused by AI is global and that there might be useful takeaways from other parts of the world. That’s what led us to schedule Jonathan Hahn from the Los Angeles Review of Books, a fierce advocate for the value of empathetic editing and the editor’s role in developing writers. I found his message uplifting, and it left me thinking about the important role professional editors play in developing an author’s craft. Jane Friedman, a prominent voice in publishing, is another: alongside her freelance business session, she spoke on how AI is disrupting the publishing industry when she presenteds for SCPD in August – 2 sessions I was incredibly proud to be able to deliver for IPEd members.
A lot of these decisions land on my desk as SCPD chair – some are direct requests from members, others are things the committee and I have identified as worth developing before anyone has asked for them. Balancing those 2 inputs, on top of a calendar that rarely cooperates, has been the real work of this first year in the role. But looking back at everything we’ve delivered – across accessibility, technical skills, preparing for the accreditation exam, genre editing and more – I’m proud of how balanced the program has turned out to be. I’m looking forward to building on that, and to everything SCPD has coming up next.