The Certified Digital Finance Practitioner Forum

This month of August 2022 we launched the CDFP Practitioner Forum. Along the CDFP journey, students go through the CDFP courses with momentum and zest, acquiring the 110 credits benchmark or more, in order to be eligible to start the final stage – the CDFP Practical. The objective of the practical is for students to demonstrate that they are, indeed, Inclusive Finance Professionals through a range of activities from research papers to students’ choice of work done within Inclusive Finance that can represent assertion in the industry.

Digital Frontiers Institute has over 1000 students on the CDFP journey and about 300 who have qualified to embark on the practical journey. Most students are stuck and inactive at the practical stage, creating a bottleneck.  The number of students who then graduate is significantly less than those who “await in practical”.

The six-week CDFP Practitioner Forum was designed to solve this bottleneck. The Practitioner Forum is especially beneficial to students who do not belong to a Community of Practice (COP) or local Digital Finance Association who are lonesome on the practical journey. The number one cause of delayed graduation has been identified as procrastination, “failure to launch!” On average, the CDFP Practical takes 6 months to complete, and an analysis of students’ path to completion showed the three top CDFP Practical submissions as 67% of students’ choice, 56% research papers and 47% blogs. The CDFP Practitioner Forum is synchronous and brings the familiar format of earning points for these milestones in a coached virtual classroom environment. The more structured approach to completing the CDFP practical has already been welcomed by over 80 students enrolled.

Each week the CDFP Practical coach hosts Question-and-Answer sessions or Virtual COP sessions and provides an opportunity to clarify any uncertainties that students may have about the practical activity and points-scoring opportunities.

A summary of the structure of the six-week journey is as follows:

 

We are looking forward to week 5 – Webinar Showcase week where students will earn points for their practical through presentations in a webinar format.

Our beta cohort for this Practitioner Forum is already moving ahead to complete their Practical Journey. There is no downside to this opportunity since each activity completed on this journey still brings you closer to certification either through the Forum or the standard Practical submissions.

We are expecting many upcoming graduations of Certified Digital Finance Practitioners!

To learn more about the The Certified Digital Finance Practitioner Forum, send an email to cdfp@digitalfrontiers.org.