Professional Learning

The Professional Learning Committee spans the CFA Societies of Melbourne and Sydney and is Co-Chaired by both Societies. The objective of the Professional Learning committee is to expand members knowledge to help them stay updated with the latest market developments and current research.

The Committee consists of a number of sub-committee streams made up of volunteers of both societies. Existing streams include Ethics & Professional Standards, Asset Class, Economics, and Portfolio Management and Wealth Planning. This year, an ESG sub-committee stream was introduced to work with the other streams to focus on areas of ESG likely to be of interest to our members. In addition, we recently introduced the role of a Partnerships convenor, to work with CFA Australia staff to organise Professional Learning events with CFA partner-oriented institutions that we expect to broaden our education and networking opportunities.

Of course, our Professional Learning offering is made available only through the efforts of our team of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers who, working collaboratively with our colleagues in Sydney, plan for, source and organise a high-quality educational program for our members. I am grateful for, and thank our PL Melbourne volunteers - Henry Lyons (Asset Class Lead), Joshua Nappa (Asset Class and Partnerships), Andrew Nolan (Economics), Anselm Loh (Economics), and Cheryl Lim (Economics) - for their generous support. I would also like to welcome and thank Lewis Jackson (Asset Class) and Chistopher Schade (ESG) who both joined the Committee this year.

The CFA Professional Learning program has sourced a wide variety of events including Chat GPT, Ethics and AI, Inflation, Australian Housing Risks and Recession, Natural Capital and Factor Investing. We have also run a successful series focussed on deglobalisation from different regional perspectives, and a differentiated series for members focussed on neurodiversity in the Investment industry. Wealth management members have benefitted from a webinar on alternatives available on private wealth platforms and at time of writing we have a number of events for a retirement series in the pipeline, as well as planned ethics workshops.

For the Financial Year ending June 2023, the Professional Learning committee hosted 24 in person and webinar sessions – for a total of 2727 registrations and 1344 actual attendees. The webinar ‘Power of Python - Demo by The Marquee Group’ attracted a staggering 524 registrations across Australia - our largest event by far, with ‘Data visualisation and decision-making’ attracting 188 registrations.

Recognising that Professional Learning events can play an important networking as well as educational opportunity, we are thrilled to have been able to offer in-person events for the first time since the pandemic period. Whilst Melbourne-based speakers have admittedly proven challenging to source, we trialled hybrid presentations with the speaker live-streamed from Sydney – importantly managed so that Melbourne based attendees have equal opportunity to ask questions as if they were in the room.  Run at lunchtime, these events have proven to be both well attended and received excellent feedback both in terms of providing an opportunity to connect with CFA colleagues, as well as the venue technology to make attending the virtual presentation a seamless experience.

Importantly as noted above, our webinars have been well attended and have offered the opportunity to source international speakers for several of our topics.

Looking forward, we are already planning for our 2024 PL agenda. We can always benefit from more volunteer input and ideas and I welcome you to contact the Melbourne Society.

Thank you for your interest. 

Professional Learning Spotlight