The PWI is required by the Engineering Council to undertake an annual audit of the completed CPD of our membership. This audit involves 5% of our registered engineers who are required to respond or risk removal from the Register, plus an additional 5% of the general membership who are invited to participate. The members of the Professional Development Committee (PDC) then review an equal number of these submissions, and complete an audit feedback form for each. Half of these forms are then peer reviewed by the PDC to ensure impartiality and fairness before being shared back with the individual member. As part of this audit and review the PDC have identified a number of observations and areas to share with our membership, so they can improve the quality of their CPD records too.

We found the “reflections” statement was probably the weakest part of the CPD submissions with ‘I was told this’, rather than ‘this is what I gained from being told that’, or ‘this is what I will now do / stop doing’. We recommend you personalise your records and describe how it will affect your behaviour.

It is important that your CPD submissions cross reference your recorded activities against your Personal Development Plan (PDP). For many of our submissions we discovered that no reference was made to the PDP at all. Your PDP should lead you to CPD activity. It should recognise your personal requirements and the needs of your employer, and acknowledge development opportunities that are currently beyond your current job role. Your PDP should think beyond the next 12 months and even further into the future. This is a particularly pertinent requirement for younger engineers.

PDC members also felt some of the CPD records were completed in a rush, possibly the night before the deadline… The PWI website has an excellent facility for recording your CPD on-line, and we recommend our membership completes this after every CPD activity. This is good practice, but of course it also prevents that last minute rush should you be chosen for an audit.

We also encountered individuals who we know are undertaking work in a voluntary capacity for the PWI, other professional engineering institutions and non-industry organisations within their wider communities. This unpaid voluntary work is excellent CPD and should be recorded.

Finally, whilst we have a long way to go before we could be described as being “best in class”, we all thought there was a big improvement in the quality of the CPD records and in the variety of the activity recorded.