CPD refers to the maintenance and development of knowledge and skills relevant to ensuring you remain competent as a professional engineer or technician.
Undertaking CPD is detailed in the IET’s rules of conduct and IET members have a professional obligation to undertake CPD. Those who are professionally registered with the Engineering Council as CEng, IEng, EngTech or ICTTech must also follow the Engineering Council’s CPD Code.
The Engineering Council have an expectation that all Professional Engineering Institutions (PEIs) will introduce monitoring of members’ CPD records and the IET are aiming to have this in place by the Engineering Council’s aspirational date of January 2017. In order to achieve this we are encouraging all members to start recording their CPD, whether they are professionally active registrants or looking to apply for professional registration in the future.
In order to prepare for the Engineering Council’s requirement, we are currently operating a voluntary opt-in scheme for TMIET, MIET and FIET members. This is supported by CPD recording functionality in Career Manager, you can find out how to record your CPD in Career Manager in our previous blog.
The CPD Elements blog series will look in a bit more detail at the types of activities that can count as CPD.
We know that our members work in a range of roles and across a number of sectors, so we recognise a wide range of CPD activities. We also don’t limit this recognition to only IET products and accept CPD from any source relevant to each member as we know you are best placed to decide what CPD is appropriate for you.
The IET split CPD into six broad categories which cover the different types of CPD that members may undertake. In a series of blog posts we will look at these types of CPD in more detail, as an overview the CPD categories are:
Training
Work Experience
Academic Study
Volunteering
Events and Seminars
Self Study
If you’re still deciding whether to join the scheme you may find my previous blog post five reasons to join the IET’s CPD monitoring scheme helpful.
You can also read about other IET members’ approach to CPD in our case studies.