While change is not always easy, it is our mission to make ICAEW’s new requirements for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) as simple as possible for you. CPD does not need to be taxing or costly. Here is a guide for how to meet your CPD goals for 2024 and document your learning throughout the year.
You may have a few new year’s resolutions already, and I’d encourage you to get the year off to a good start by incorporating CPD in your goals. Find out how the new CPD regulations affect you and create a plan to help you spread your required CPD hours across the CPD year (which ends 31 October 2024).
Setting your CPD goals
When I decide on my CPD goals, I like to start with a reflective exercise which usually goes hand-in-hand with setting work objectives for the year ahead. If you have been an ICAEW member for a while, you will be familiar with starting your CPD year by identifying gaps in your skills and knowledge, including any learning and development needs that may impact your role. In addition, you will now need to understand how many verifiable and other CPD hours you will need to complete and document. Read our guidance on who needs to comply with the new CPD regulations and use our CPD self-assessment tool to find out what your specific requirements are.
Once you know your development goals and your CPD requirements, make sure you understand what learning activities can count towards your verifiable CPD hours and what evidence you will need to document your learning. You may be surprised to see the variety of learning activities you can use towards your CPD. We have provided guidance on this with some examples of how to evidence your learning.
Charity-specific CPD support
The Charity Community regularly provides CPD-eligible webinars and events. Many of these are free to ICAEW members.
Our virtual Charity Conference (18 and 19 January 2024) provides over 7.5h of verifiable CPD, providing you can demonstrate that the content is relevant to your role. All the sessions are recorded, so you choose to attend live or watch the sessions on demand later.
If you watch the recordings of previous webinars, you can still verify your CPD by completing our CPD verification form – the link is available on the right-hand side of the recordings in our ‘webinar library’.
We also circulate a monthly Community newsletter to keep you up to date with developments throughout the year – you can still find most articles here.
If you are a charity trustee, please see our trustee-related CPD guidance which includes a free hour-long CPD course for charity trustees (to watch on demand). If the course prompts you to delve deeper and you want to learn how you can be more effective in your role, I’d encourage you to also complete our free Trustee Training Modules (e-learning). We updated the training on 1 November 2023 to introduce more interactivity and quizzes to make the training more engaging. On completion of the training, you will gain a certificate if you complete the final assessment successfully.
Because you are reading this Charity Community article, it’s likely that you are interested in sector-specific learning activities. However, I also encourage you to look at the learning activities offered by our Faculties and other Communities.
Documenting your CPD activities
I highly recommend scheduling some time every week, month or quarter to document your CPD activities. 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 a new online CPD record which you can access through your member dashboard.
Using our new digital tools, you can add ICAEW learning activities to your online CPD record effortlessly. This means a lot less time spent on documentation and allows you to keep track of how many CPD hours you have already completed and how many more are due for the year.
Hopefully, by making CPD part of your new year’s resolutions, you will find that, by October 2024, you have completed and documented all your CPD activities already.