CPD Leadership Still Runs on Serendipity

Key Takeaways

• CPD leadership is still often learned after appointment, not before it. That creates variability in how programs are led, defended, and improved.
• AI-assisted medical writing is becoming a workflow issue, not only a technology issue. The missing layer is explicit governance inside every content brief.
• The common thread is preparation: CME providers need clearer pathways for leaders and clearer rules for tools.

Two CPD-insider conversations this week pointed to the same operational weakness: CME work is still too often held together by individual judgment rather than formal preparation and written rules. The evidence is not broad clinician consensus—it comes from a journal-affiliated CPD leadership podcast and a writer-focused CME production podcast—but both sources expose the cost of leaving core work informal.

CPD leadership is still treated as something people grow into alone

A JCEHP Emerging Best Practices in CPD episode centered on a familiar route into CPD leadership: someone is doing adjacent education work, gets tapped for a CPD role, and learns the job while carrying responsibility for quality, strategy, operations, and credibility.

The episode’s source base matters. It is a journal-affiliated discussion with CPD educators and organization voices, and the underlying research perspective was largely from large academic Canadian settings. So the right read is not “the whole field has reached consensus.” The sharper read is that CPD leadership is being named as a role with distinct demands: vision, systems thinking, change management, scholarship, learner understanding, data fluency, credibility, humility, creativity, and interpersonal skill.

For providers, the risk is not only succession planning. It is program variability. If CPD leaders are selected because they are available, respected, or adjacent to the work—but not developed against a clear competency map—then quality depends too much on local apprenticeship and personal resilience.

We saw a related point in an earlier brief on ability-based progression: structure has to come before scale. The same applies to the people running the learning enterprise. CME teams should ask: which parts of CPD leadership are currently taught, which are assumed, and which are only discovered after someone is already accountable?

AI content work needs rules inside the brief

The second signal came from a Write Medicine episode on AI in medical writing. This was a writer-centric source, and part of the episode discussed a specific tool, so it should not be treated as independent market consensus. Strip away the tool discussion, though, and the workflow issue is clear: AI is being used around literature review, gap analysis, outlining, case development, plain-language translation, and visual support.

That creates a different management problem than “should we use AI?” The better question is what must be written into the content-development process before a writer, faculty member, or vendor uses it. The episode emphasized risks around fabricated or inaccurate output, bias, generic voice, copyright, attribution, transparency, and the handling of client-owned material.

For CME providers, this is not solved by a one-page policy stored in a compliance folder. It belongs in the work order: what inputs are allowed, what cannot be uploaded, how sources must be verified, when AI use must be disclosed, who owns final judgment, and how reviewers will detect flattened voice or missing context.

The concrete implication: every AI-assisted content brief should include a verification plan, a data-use boundary, and a human accountability line. If those three items are absent, the provider is not governing AI use; it is hoping individual writers make the right calls under deadline pressure.

What CME Teams Should Audit

• Map current and rising CPD leaders against a short competency grid: strategy, change management, scholarship, learner/context expertise, and operations.
• Create a mentorship-plus-certificate pathway for at least one emerging CPD leader rather than waiting for a vacancy to force development.
• Add AI-use instructions to every content brief: permitted inputs, prohibited uploads, source-checking requirements, disclosure expectations, and final human owner.
• Review one AI-assisted draft and one fully human draft for accuracy, bias, source integrity, and voice before setting broader workflow rules.

What to reconsider

The week’s common thread is not leadership theory or AI enthusiasm. It is whether CME providers are willing to formalize the work they already rely on. If CPD leadership remains accidental, the field keeps depending on talented people to invent their own preparation. If AI writing remains informal, providers keep depending on individual caution to protect quality and trust. Both may work for a while. Neither is a system.