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CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

What is Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?

CPD is your way of keeping up to date with skills, knowledge, experience and industry news.  CPD needs to be recorded and as demonstrates that you are committed to improving your knowledge throughout your career.

You will need to manage your own CPD and when requested, send your CPD record to the ICE.

Benefits of CPD

  • Professional pride - throughout your career, you will never stop learning.  Whether this is on the job training, undertaking courses or watching webinars, you should be constantly developing your skills and knowledge to become a better engineer.

  • Client reassurance - demonstrating to clients and stakeholders that you are aware of current regulations, standards and best practice.

  • Career development - you should identify your gaps in skills, knowledge and qualifications to constantly improve yourself.

 

The CPD cycle

Undertaking CPD follows the following cycle (you should do this once a year):

  1. Identify development needs - review your performance in the past year and identify any gaps in your skills and knowledge.  Using a SWOT analysis or skills matrix can help you here.  Think about your short, medium and long term goals and your 'hard' (technical) and 'soft' (behavioural) performance.

  2. Create a Development Action Plan (DAP) - come up with a plan of how to meet your development needs, considering activities, resources and timescales.  For many of us, annual appraisals at work could form a good basis for your DAP.  An example DAP can be found below.

  3. Record activities in a Personal Development Record (PDR) - record your CPD activities.  An example template can be found below.

  4. Evaluate development activities - what have you learnt and how has this helped you in your career?

CPD cycle.png

Example CPD activities

There are many ways to achieve CPD, as shown in the list below.  Remember, try and get a varied CPD record - no-one wants to see a just list of training courses that your employer has sent you on!

  • Training course

  • Webinars/seminars

  • On-the-job training

  • Personal research on the internet

  • Reading journals

  • Presentations

  • Work shadowing

  • Promoting engineering in schools

  • Job secondments

How much CPD?

You need a minimum of 30 hours CPD per year.  For CEng candidates, you need a minimum of 180 hours before applying for your review.  For IEng candidates, you need a minimum of 90 hours.

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