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This audio file was produced by AI and is based on the regulatory news article above on CPD changes.
“What we’ve been seeing over the past year or so is a renewed focus on lifelong learning by members,” says Sophie. “The changes have helped bring CPD back to the top of people's agendas, and the specific responsibilities placed on firms are helping to reinforce this.”
“As a profession, we need to be constantly developing and learning,” emphasises Julia, who was a member of the ICAEW Council Working Party that initiated the review of CPD requirements. “No professional can do their job effectively without constantly learning.”
Under ICAEW’s revised CPD Regulations, which took effect in November 2023, members must carry out a minimum number of hours, including a number of verifiable hours, based on their areas of work and the associated level of public interest. The type of CPD members choose to undertake is up to them, though it must be relevant for the roles, apart from mandatory ethics training.
Alongside the requirements placed on individual members, member firms (and other firms regulated by ICAEW) now have an obligation to ensure all the ICAEW members and ICAEW-regulated individuals who work for them comply with at least the minimum CPD hours for their CPD category. Firms must also maintain records of those hours and provide these to the Quality Assurance Department (QAD) for inspection on request.
The changes, which marked a shift away from an output-based model where members simply completed an appropriate amount of CPD, originated from a wider initiative by ICAEW Council to strengthen public trust in the accountancy profession in the aftermath of some high profile corporate and auditing failures.
As well as making it clear to individuals how much CPD they need to do, the requirements enhance ICAEW’s ability to monitor and assure that members’ CPD reflects the increasingly complex professional and regulatory environments within which they work.
With the new regime now embedded, QAD reviewers are starting their monitoring visits which take place on a risk-based cycle. “We will select a sample for the first year based on risk levels, so it may be that your firm isn’t selected this year, but may be visited on a future cycle,” says Sophie.
Recording uptake
Under the CPD Regulations, there are requirements to record CPD, so that members, and their firms, can demonstrate compliance with the minimum hours.
Members can record CPD in any way they choose; this could be a simple spreadsheet, a CPD system used by their employer or the online CPD recording tool provided by ICAEW. Members don’t have to use ICAEW’s tool but, by the end of the first CPD year under the new framework, 65,000 members had recorded CPD activity in this way, equating to 1.2 million hours of CPD activity.
“We know members have always been developing themselves as professionals,” says Sophie. “But before they might not have been identifying what they were doing as CPD and therefore may not have been recording it. So, we’re really pleased to see that a substantial proportion of the membership have chosen to use our new recording tool to capture their CPD in real time.”
To help members comply with the new mandatory ethics CPD requirement, ICAEW also produced a free online course designed to help people apply the Code of Ethics to everyday situations. Again, although ethics training is mandatory, members don’t have to complete the ICAEW course. “Our figures show, however, that 50,000 members have done at least one hour of our CPD ethics course,” says Sophie. “And this doesn’t even capture all the members who have taken that course via firms’ own learning management systems.
“We've had positive feedback from members about both the ethics course and the online CPD record,” she adds. A recent survey by ICAEW’s digital team showed that 86% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with the functionality of the online record.
ICAEW produces a wide range of online content to support members’ CPD, including technical and general articles, helpsheets, podcasts, films and webinars. The removal of most faculty pay walls for members has also helped to increase access to these materials. By using another digital tool, ‘AddCPD’, members can automatically log their consumption of this content as verifiable CPD directly to their record.
“We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to record their CPD,” says Sophie. “Much of our icaew.com content can be verifiable CPD, so if you read a technical web page or an article, you can click on the plus CPD button when it appears on the bottom right-hand side of the page, and it automatically adds the activity to your CPD record.” ICAEW’s digital team is working on adding further functionality to the online CPD record to make it even easier to record CPD in future.
Driving improvement
Under the previous CPD system, it was hard to ascertain whether a member had undertaken sufficient CPD because it was left to the member's discretion to identify what they needed to do and to act accordingly.
“During conduct or regulatory cases, we frequently identify failings in the competence of members, which are reflected in deficiencies in the work they’ve done,” says Sophie. “One of the key changes under the new regime is the ability of relevant regulatory or disciplinary committees to look at what CPD category a member is in and how many hours they would normally be expected to do.
“This provides a barometer for how much more they should be doing,” she continues. “If a member is supposed to be doing 30 hours and there are serious deficiencies in the quality of their work, the relevant committee could decide to impose a requirement for them to do more CPD hours and provide direction as to what that CPD should include.”
These types of remedial orders are already being used by disciplinary and regulatory committees. For example, orders have been issued in relation to breaches of the Apprenticeship Regulations and the Code of Ethics requesting that respondents undertake training courses in professional ethics by a given date.
“From a member's point of view, and the public’s point of view, everybody understands the logic that if you don't know enough to do your job competently, you need to do more CPD,” adds Julia. “It's about correcting the root cause of problems. Simply issuing a financial penalty might be necessary as a deterrent, but it doesn't correct the root cause, whereas saying you need to do more training potentially does.”
“This approach aligns fully with our role as an improvement regulator,” adds Sophie. “We want to make sure issues don’t arise again and that performance is better next time, so this is an extra tool our disciplinary and regulatory committees can use and will continue to use.”
Professional obligations
“It's a time of great change in the accountancy profession,” says Julia. “And if you want to be a professional at the top of your game, you need to be continually learning. It’s your obligation to keep yourself up to date because your clients need to trust that you’ll do quality work, comply with current legislation and adhere to high ethical standards.
“When we talk about keeping up to date,” she adds, “it’s worth clarifying what we mean because people can sometimes misinterpret this aspect. We're not saying you should be able to do everything you could do when you qualified; if you don’t ever give tax advice, you don’t need to keep up to date on tax matters. It's about you being competent for the role you're now doing."
“This is about your personal development,” agrees Sophie. “You need to reflect on what you need to do to develop as a professional and that might be technical updates on issues relevant to your role, or it might be on anti-money laundering risks, or it might be improving your leadership skills.”
Lifelong learning
Having been involved from the start of the project to revamp ICAEW’s approach to CPD, Julia is pleased with the results and feedback during the first year.
“What we’re seeing so far is very encouraging,” she says. “It's also powerful because CPD is all about us, as professionals, being good at what we do. And lifelong learning is an integral part of that. If you don't want to carry on learning, don't be a professional.
“It’s also being able to say: ‘Not only am I keeping myself up to date in a changing environment, but my professional body monitors what I’m doing so it can demonstrate that its membership is keeping up to date’. And that holds a lot of value because it's about building trust in our profession, as well as in us, as individuals.”
