Digital tools to record and verify CPD

Identifying your CPD category

ICAEW has created a self-assessment tool to help you identify your CPD category and, therefore, how much CPD you are required to complete each year.

The tool takes you through a series of questions about the nature of your work and the organisations you work with, the tool will suggest which CPD category you fall into.

Once you’ve completed the self-assessment, you can simply click a button to add the suggested CPD category into your record. 

Recording your CPD

As an ICAEW member, you are expected to record your professional development needs each year and the activities you completed to meet those needs. If you are selected for monitoring by ICAEW’s Quality Assurance Department, you must provide evidence that you have met your CPD requirements.

You can choose to record your CPD in any way that suits you, but to make the process as easy as possible ICAEW has created an online CPD record which you can access through your member dashboard.

The record enables you to document your CPD requirements, the activities you’ve completed and upload verification evidence via icaew.com, meaning its accessible anywhere, at any time.

The record is also linked to ICAEW’s new AddCPD tool. This means that is easy to add the time spent on icaew.com as verified CPD.

Accessing your CPD record

Every ICAEW member has been provided with a digital CPD record. To access your record, log into icaew.com and navigate to ‘My dashboard’. You will see ‘CPD record’ as an option in the navigation bar at the top of the screen.

In the record, the best place to start is by adding your CPD category. You will then be able to track your progress against your total required hours and verified CPD hours throughout the year.

Using your CPD record

When you are clear on your CPD requirements, you can write your reflective plan inside the digital record and save it. You can update your plan throughout the year, if you identify new CPD needs.

They key purpose of the online record is to hold information on the different CPD activities you complete throughout the year in one easy-to-manage place.

Every time you add an activity, you’re prompted to include details, including:

• when you undertook the activity,
• how long it took,
• why you chose the activity, and
• what you learned from it. 

These details will be used to calculate how much CPD you have to complete for the rest of the year and demonstrate how each activity is relevant for your professional development.

If you are short of time or don’t have all the information you need to hand, you can save activities and come back later to add more detail or to upload verification evidence.

You can upload a range of different file types as evidence, including Word documents (docx), PowerPoint presentations (pptx), PDFs, Excel sheets (xlsx) and images (png, jpg, jpeg). You can also add emails as evidence if they are saved as images or PDFs.

If you have completed any modules on ICAEW’s Ethics CPD Course, you won’t need to add this activity to your record. Module certificates automatically transfer across and appear as a verified CPD activity that contributes to your ethics requirement.

AddCPD – verifying CPD on icaew.com

ICAEW produces a huge range of content on icaew.com to support members’ professional development.

Alongside insights providing the latest developments impacting finance and accountancy professionals, our communities offer webinars tailored to industries or specialisms, while the faculties and technical advisory team provide a wealth of technical support.

Whether you’re listening to an insights podcast explaining the Economic Crime Act or reading through a technical helpsheet on accounting for crypto currencies, this can count towards your verifiable CPD requirements, thanks to AddCPD.

The tool appears as a pop up at the bottom right of icaew.com webpages when you are logged into the site.

Once you’ve finished reading, watching or listening the content on that page, you click on ‘+CPD’ to add that activity to your record.

The tool will then ask you for some information about that activity, including how long you spent on the page and what you learned. You’ll then be able to save that activity to your record, where it will automatically contribute towards your verified CPD requirements.

You can then carry on browsing icaew.com.

AddCPD - verifying Bloomsbury content

ICAEW has expanded the application of the AddCPD tool to enable members to verify their use of the ebooks provided via the Bloomsbury Accounting and Tax Service. The service, which is available to all members of staff at eligible firms, offers access to more than 80 titles covering core accountancy and tax topics.

To verify engagement with any of the Bloomsbury ebooks, members will now be able to click on a pop up next to the link and add the details of their reading, as they do with other pages using the AddCPD tool.

The pop up will activate after you have clicked on the link to the resource. So once you’ve finished reading go back to the icaew.com page you clicked from and you’ll be able to add the reading as a verified CPD activity.

Watch the video below, for a step-by-step guide on how to use the functionality.

CPD on the move

You don’t need to be on a desktop to access your online CPD record or use AddCPD; they both work on a mobile or tablet.

You just need to log into icaew.com on your usual internet browser (these tools are not yet available through the MyICAEW app). 

Once your logged into icaew.com you can record your CPD wherever you are.