Your guide to CPD

Step 1: How much CPD?

Maintaining your CPD throughout your career strengthens your credibility. It provides you with the skills and knowledge you need to do your role more effectively and prepares you for the challenges ahead. 

The amount of professional development that ICAEW members are required to complete each CPD year (1 November-31 October, see below) varies depending on the type of work you undertake and the organisations you work with. For example, a finance director at a large company is expected to undertake more than a member of the finance team.

ICAEW’s CPD Regulations divide professional roles into six categories. The category you fall into determines the minimum amount of CPD you need complete each year and for how many hours you need to provide evidence of completion for (see table below). 

The default category is 3, which has the lowest CPD requirements, however, working for certain organisations, or delivering particular services, can place you into a higher category.

For example, those leading external audits for a public interest entity fall into practice category 1, while the head of finance at an small business would fall into non-practice category 3.

ICAEW has created an online CPD self-assessment tool where you spend a few minutes answering questions about your role and it will determine which CPD category you fall into.

• More guidance on who must comply with ICAEW's CPD Regulations, as well as details of individuals who may be exempt.
• More guidance on the terminology used in the CPD categories

Step 2: How to approach CPD

Once you’ve identified your CPD category, you should follow the RAID approach to your CPD requirements: reflect, act, impact and declare.

Reflect

Think about your development needs and how you can meet them. Create a plan of action, considering:

• Expectations – what do others expect of you and what standards do you expect of yourself?
• Changes – what are the main changes affecting you in your role?
• Responsibilities – what are the areas of responsibility for your role?
• Environment – what are the main business environment issues for you?
• Knowledge gaps – what do you need to know about?

Act

Undertake CPD activities that meet your development plan. A huge range of activities can count towards your CPD (see Step 3, below).

Impact

Evaluate the effectiveness of what you have done. Are you satisfied that your actions have enabled you to meet your objectives, or do you need more CPD in any particular area?

Declare

As part of your annual membership renewal, you will declare that you have met you’re your CPD requirements for the preceding year (1 November – 31 October).

If you are selected for review You may be asked to provide evidence of your compliance as part of our annual monitoring process you will need to be able to provide evidence of your compliance.

We recommend that you keep a record of your CPD during the year so that you can submit this easily if required to do so (see Step 6, below).

Step 3: What counts as CPD?

For an activity to count as CPD, it must be contributing to your professional development, and you need to show in your CPD record how each activity is relevant to your role and how it has helped meet your learning needs.

CPD is not restricted to activities focused on technical accounting or finance. The development of soft skills, such as communication, leadership and change management, are equally considered professional development.

A wide range of activities can constitute CPD, including:

• listening to podcasts,
• receiving coaching,
• watching webinars,
• reading articles,
• on-the-job training,
• learning from colleagues, and
• attending courses and events.

A huge range of resources are included as part of your ICAEW membership, including the majority of faculty and community content.

Whenever you see the AddCPD logo on the bottom right of a page, then that content can also contribute to your verifiable CPD hours.

Step 4: What does verifiable mean?

ICAEW’s CPD Regulations require that some of your CPD activity is verifiable - that you can provide independent evidence of its completion. This could include:

• an email confirming attendance at a webinar from the organiser;
• records of on-the-job training from a mentor, manager or tutor;
• a certificate of completion for a course, or
• correspondence with an expert in resolving technical issues.

The key things to remember about verifiable evidence is that must be factually accurate, corroborated by an independent source and in a format that can be included in your CPD record.

As part of ICAEW's online CPD record, the AddCPD tool verifies your engagement with articles, videos and podcasts on icaew.com for CPD purposes. AddCPD enables you to add the page you're browsing to your online CPD record and verifies that activity.

• Read more guidance on verifiable CPD.

Step 5: Understanding the ethics requirement

ICAEW does not mandate CPD topics, given the variety of work undertaken by our members. The exception to this is ethics. To satisfy the regulations you must complete at least one hour of ethics-related training each CPD year and this activity must be independently verifiable.

To help members meet this requirement, ICAEW has created an Ethics CPD Course, which provides up to 12 hours of verifiable CPD. However, this course does not have to be used and individuals can complete equivalent training as long as it meets the same learning outcomes.

ICAEW's free online Ethics CPD course is broken down into four modules and covers specialist areas, including: audit, economic crime, insolvency and tax. ICAEW will be updating the course annually to provide an hour of additional CPD on the latest development in ethics and continue this support for members. 

Step 6: 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 (see Step 2 above).

You can choose to record your CPD in any way that suits you - this could be a simple spreadsheet, a CPD system used by your employer or the digital CPD record provided by ICAEW (see below).

If you are selected for monitoring by ICAEW’s Quality Assurance Department, you must provide evidence that you have met your CPD requirements.

Your CPD record should include the following information:

1. A detailed description of your role and responsibilities
   - Include all roles held during the CPD year (1 November to 31 October), including the relevant CPD category.
2. A detailed description of your development needs. This must cover:
   - changes to your role;
   - technical aspects;
   - ethics and professional scepticism; and
   - professional skills and development.
3. A list of all CPD activities you have undertaken and how long they have taken.
   - for activities contributing to your verifiable CPD hours, you will need to keep records of the evidence of the completion of these activities.
4. Outline the impact of those actions.
5. Detail any matters carried forward to next year.
6. Your reflections for next year.

Your digital CPD record

To help make the CPD recording 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 AddCPD tool. This means that is easy to add the time spent on icaew.com as verified CPD.

• Find out more about digital tools to help you record CPD.