Understanding nurses’ dispositions for continuing professional development: A scoping review

AIM: To map what is known about nurses' dispositions for continuing professional development and their associations with engagement through initiation, persistence and application to practice. BACKGROUND: Continuing professional development helps nurses maintain competence and respond to changing evidence and care demands, yet engagement is often framed through motivation, barriers and facilitators rather than disposition-related learning tendencies. DESIGN: Scoping review. METHODS: Guided by Arksey and O'Malley's framework, informed by Joanna Briggs Institute guidance and reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, searches published between 2000 and 2025 were conducted in five databases. Fourteen peer-reviewed primary studies were included. Data were charted using a structured extraction framework and synthesised using Habits of Mind as a sensitising analytic scaffold. RESULTS: Studies spanned diverse settings and used quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods designs. Dispositions were rarely named explicitly. Instead, studies examined adjacent constructs such as perceived value of CPD, attitudes and motives, willingness, responsibility attribution and learning agency or self-management. These constructs were most consistently linked to CPD initiation and persistence, often in interaction with workplace conditions. Application to practice was less frequently examined and was most visible when CPD was embedded in evidence-informed practice development and collaborative workplace learning. CONCLUSION: The literature provides stronger insight into participation than into learning transfer. As grey literature and non-English studies were excluded, the findings should be interpreted as a map of the evidence base. Future research should strengthen conceptual clarity, improve measurement and examine transfer across diverse practice contexts.