The IET refer to two different aspects of professional development, Initial Professional Development (IPD) and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) but it can sometimes be difficult to define these terms.
Initial Professional Development (IPD) refers to the development and practical application of the knowledge, skills and behaviour required for professional registration. Professional registration requires a range of experience across a number of competence areas. These will take time to develop and a structured approach to your development will ensure that you are able to achieve registration at the right time in your career.
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) refers both to the development of new skills or knowledge and maintenance of existing knowledge and skills to ensure it remains up to date. CPD can be undertaken for personal or professional development.
The IET recognise many different types of activity might make up your professional development, and accept both structured and less structured activities as valid CPD. These may include:
Training courses
Work experience
Academic study
Volunteering
Events and seminars
Self-study (e.g. reading and internet research).
Which category does my development fall into?
If you are currently working toward professional registration then it is likely that most of your development activities will focus on developing the competences required for your desired category of professional registration and will be recognised for IPD, but these also contribute more widely to your career development so can equally constitute CPD activities. Recording your professional development is particularly important at this stage as you will need to demonstrate evidence of your competence when you are ready to submit an application for professional registration.
If you have already achieved professional registration or are not considering applying professional registration but are working as a professional engineer then development is just as important as this shows current or future employers how you have developed and maintained your skills to ensure you remain competent and competitive.
Whichever category your development falls into, it is important to keep a record of what you have learned and reflect on how this has affected your practice or what you gained from the learning. You can record your development on IET Career Manager, and there are quick guides and webinars to help you whether you are recording IPD or CPD.
Why make a distinction between the two categories?
The IET make a distinction between IPD and CPD because we offer slightly different support for each stage of professional development.
For those working toward professional registration we offer support through the IPD Service which provides information on how to progress with your initial professional development in regular emails which detail what you can do at each stage and how we can support you toward professional registration.
For those undertaking continuing professional development we offer a Voluntary (opt-in) CPD Monitoring Scheme for TMIETs, MIETs and Fellows, which gives you the opportunity to demonstrate compliance with the IET’s CPD requirements to your employer, colleagues and clients as well as gaining generic feedback to benchmark yourself against how much and what type of CPD is undertaken by other members of the scheme.
You can read my blog Get Started With Professional Registration for further information on IPD or read Caroline’s blog Five Reasons To Join The IET's CPD Monitoring Scheme for further information on CPD or drop us an e-mail at Profdev@theiet.org if you want to discuss your own development.