As recently as five years ago, the way to some US architects' hearts - at least when it came to training and development - was through their stomachs. "The [building material] manufacturers would go into architect firms' offices with food - that's how they got in - and whichever manufacturer had the better food would become the firms' training department," says Thom Lowther.
Mr Lowther, senior director of the American Institute of Architects' Continuing Education System, has worked hard to ensure this appetite-driven approach to professional development has been consigned to history. The CES programme, which began 13 years ago, helps architecture practices think strategically about their training needs, then bring in trained educators from the manufacturers and other organisations.
"It doesn't sound like a really hard thing to do but the firms weren't doing that," says Mr Lowther.
The AIA's approach illustrates how the bodies worldwide are becoming more serious about continuous professional development - or CPD. The layman may take it for granted that a professional - whether a doctor, a dentist or an accountant - will take responsibility for keeping up to date with new thinking, technical developments and rule changes in their field.
The vast majority do just that - supported, or cajoled at times, by their employers and professional associations. But with new pressures from ever more demanding customers and regulators, and an increasingly litigious environment, all the parties involved in CPD and general management training are redoubling efforts to ensure the time spent on development is used effectively.
The nature of off-the-job training for senior executives, for example, has changed radically over the past two decades. Gone are the days when "managers were run through a sheep-dip at a staff college", as Martyn Sloman, adviser for learning, training and development at the UK's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, puts it.
"Now you get managers to bring projects from the workplace to the event," he says. Working with a group of peers they can receive help, support and advice on the project in a learning environment, giving them a reason to attend that in the past was often lacking.
The drivers for improving and broadening CPD vary widely, in reaction to the ebb and flow of market forces and the shifting concerns of society at large. For civil engineers, the buzzword at present is sustainability - everything from the underlying science to legislation and codes of practice, says Gareth Jones, senior manager for professional development at the UK's Institution for Civil Engineers.
For US architects, the AIA encouraged best practice through events such as leadership summits, bringing in the best firms as instructors and facilitators.
But there was also a powerful external factor: over the past 13 years virtually all US states have made CPD a prerequisite for architects to keep their licences, says Mr Lowther. "So if we are going to have to do it, why not do it well?"
In accountancy, professional bodies worldwide have responded to a succession of corporate scandals by introducing various flavours of mandatory CPD in the past two years - if they had not done so already. The aim has been to bolster confidence in the reliability of individual practitioners and the profession as a whole.
The new approach has "upped the ante for accountants to specify what training and development they really need", says John Watkins, director of learning and development at PKF (UK) LLP, the mid-sized UK accountancy firm. "Individuals are finally being required formally to document their CPD and make sure they can prove that their choices were the right thing to do."
Even before the onset of mandatory CPD, however, accountancy groups and professional bodies - along with their counterparts in other professions - were overhauling their approach to the development of their members or employees. It is no longer a matter of simply putting in time on CPD - now the emphasis is largely on "outcomes" that can be planned and monitored.
Mr Watkins became responsible for training at PKF five years ago, and promptly got rid of a system where, as he puts it, "there was certainly a feeling that you needed to get your 25 annual hours of CPD, or whatever it was. If that meant doing courses that were not relevant to you but helped you clock up the hours, then at least you could demonstrate that you had put in the input at the front end."
Now things are very different. "The idea that you spend a long, hard three years slogging through exams and then take your foot off the gas or not be monitored in any close way has been proved to be outdated," he says.
Meanwhile, organisations such as consultancies, which see themselves as professional but do not have qualifying exams, certification or mandatory membership of powerful professional bodies, have to make their own decisions about CPD. "Our people get a lot of training at junior level, and they come out of that pretty competent at consultancy techniques, but we are continually thinking about how we maintain that," says Andrew Hooke, chief operating officer at PA Consulting.
"You have to provide further training and get people to want to do it. Beyond the core training, it is essential to ensure we are doing enough on technique, content and industry knowledge, because as consultants we have to be a step ahead of the game - otherwise we are redundant."
These varied approaches are set against a backdrop of fundamental changes in the world of work and in the delivery of training to employees. "Efforts to develop employees, across industries, have taken a step up in the past five years, and more money and time is being spent on it," says Pat Galagan, executive editor at the American Society for Training & Development.
The skills gap affecting many industries - a loss of brainpower and management talent as experienced workers retire and new, younger employees replace them - means companies are no longer simply paying lip-service to the slogan "People are our most important asset", she says.
This explains why "talent management" has entered the vocabulary, says Ms Galagan. "You decide what skills you need, go out to find them and develop them and then make sure people stick around."
Mr Sloman at the CIPD talks of the emergence of a "service-led, knowledge-driven" global economy in which the importance of acquiring skills is increasing. The way in which these skills are delivered is shifting from a traditional, top-down instructional model to a more decentralised approach that puts greater emphasis on learning at work.
As knowledge workers par excellence , professionals are at the centre of these developments. And as their careers progress, they are increasingly likely to experience this decentralisation trend in the form of one-to-one coaching and mentoring.
Graham Guest, a UK-based coach and CPD consultant, sees a growing interest in these approaches as part of, or complementary to, a traditional CPD package.
"It is all about encouraging people to look at things from a different perspective," he says. "It's also where the personal development side comes in - more and more, the way the world is operating, we are seeing personal and professional development as being two sides of the same coin."
All these trends are creating global opportunities for CPD, coaching and general management training providers, but perhaps nowhere more so than in Asia. The rapidly-growing economies of China and India cannot keep up with the need for managers as businesses expand, says Ms Galagan.
Lisa Yip, head of professional development in Hong Kong for Kaplan, the US training and development company, says professional people in Hong Kong and China may be very busy but still find time for their CPD.
"After work, they will log on to the internet or come to one of our courses in their own time, to make sure they are keeping up to date," she says. "There is a strong culture of self-improvement - it's one reason why you see people here with a lot of titles after their name."
Wherever they are working, however, professionals simply cannot ignore their CPD.
As Mr Jones at the ICE puts it - in a remark that holds true well beyond civil engineering: "You are expected to know about everything - and the everything is getting bigger."
