Continuing professional development for college teachers in Bangladesh

Exploration of critical success factors

Abstract

Purpose: Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a fundamental issue for knowledge management in teaching. Teachers get more benefits from it because of the opportunities for participation in training, workshops, seminars, symposiums, mentoring programs, research work, coaching, and others.  This study explores college teachers’ perceptions about CPD at the college level for knowledge management and lifelong learning and identifies the factors that contribute to designing CPD.

Methodology: An organizational case study with mixed methods and a multistage cluster sampling technique were applied to carry out this research. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, college teachers’ face-to-face appointments were converted to e-mail communication to capture data.

Findings: Of the 63 scheduled appointments, 37 (58.73%) respondents sent their responses via e-mail. For proper empirical evaluation, we used the non-parametric Mann–Whitney and Shapiro–Wilk tests. Tested and confirmed result of the study suggested that age, subject, length of service, gender, in-house training, necessary skills, administrative support, networking capacity, and online facility are the important contributors to CPD and knowledge management.

Implications of the study: The facts and findings of our study are very important for policymakers and stakeholders to formulate appropriate policies.