01
What CPD is.
Continuing Professional Development, usually shortened to CPD, is the work a professional does to stay good at their job after the initial training is over. The reading. The courses. The conferences. The hour spent properly sitting with a tricky case rather than skimming past it. It's the bit between "qualified" and "still worth listening to in ten years."
The term is most often used in regulated professions — medicine, law, accountancy, teaching, engineering, surveying, social work — where a regulator or membership body expects evidence that practitioners are keeping their knowledge current. But the principle applies more broadly: any work where the right answer in 2020 is no longer the right answer in 2026 quietly relies on its people doing CPD, whether or not they call it that.
Different bodies use slightly different language. CE (continuing education), CPE (continuing professional education) and CME (continuing medical education) all sit in the same neighbourhood. We use CPD because it's the term most common in the UK, where we are.
02
The types of CPD.
Most regulators sort CPD into two or three buckets. The names vary — what one body calls "structured", another calls "verifiable" — but the underlying idea is the same: how much of it can someone else stand behind on your behalf?
Structured · also called verifiable, formal, or accredited
CPD with someone else's name on it.
Courses, qualifications, workshops, e-learning, conferences, lectures — anything with a defined syllabus, an identifiable provider, and (usually) a certificate at the end. The thing that distinguishes structured CPD is the paper trail: a third party will vouch that you sat through it.
Unstructured · also called informal, self-directed, or non-verifiable
CPD that's just you and the work.
Reading journals. Listening to a relevant podcast on the train. Watching a peer in theatre. Picking apart a case that didn't go the way you expected. It still counts, and it's often where the real learning happens — but you're the one vouching for it, which is why most regulators cap how much of your annual total can come from this bucket.
Reflective · sometimes folded into the other two
The thinking-about-the-thinking part.
A written note on what you took away, what you'd do differently, what a piece of learning changed in your practice. Some bodies treat reflection as a required wrapper around all CPD; others as its own category. Either way, it's the bit that turns an event into actual development, which is presumably what was meant by the second word.
Always check your own body's definitions before counting anything — they're frustratingly close, but not identical. What the GMC calls one thing, the SRA calls another, and the RICS has its own taste again.
03
The methods, roughly grouped.
The same hour can be spent in very different ways. None of these is superior in the abstract — the right method is the one that genuinely changes how you'd do the work tomorrow.
- Courses & qualifications
- Short courses, modular learning, postgraduate study, online programmes, and the rest. The most legible form of CPD because it produces a certificate; not always the most efficient way to learn.
- Workshops & conferences
- A day or two of concentrated input, often combined with the underrated CPD method of "running into people who do the job in another building." Conferences are sometimes maligned, but the corridor conversations frequently outlast the sessions.
- Reading & writing
- Journals, books, longform reporting, professional magazines, well-kept blogs. And writing too — explaining a topic on paper is one of the quickest ways to learn whether you actually understood it.
- Practice & supervision
- Working under someone better than you are, in a structured way. Mentoring, peer supervision, case-based discussion, observed practice. Quiet, undramatic, and often the highest-yield form of CPD on the list.
- Teaching & speaking
- Running a session, contributing to training, giving a talk. The combination of "preparing" and "answering unexpected questions" is unusually clarifying. Most regulators count it as CPD, often as structured.
- Self-study & reflection
- Time set aside to think through a case, draft a reflection, or work through a topic on your own. Cheap, available, easy to skip — and usually the first thing to slip when the diary gets busy.
04
Recording it.
Most professional bodies expect some kind of log: what you did, when, for how long, and a sentence or two on what came of it. The format varies — points, hours, credits, narrative reflections — but the spirit is consistent: enough of a record that an outside auditor could see, at a glance, that the year was spent.
A few principles travel well across regulators. Keep the certificate. Write the reflection sooner rather than later, while it's still vivid. Be honest about how much of your time was actually attentive learning, not just attendance. And don't trust your memory in November to reconstruct what you did in March.
05
What good CPD looks like.
We won't pretend there's a single rubric. But across the material we've read for this project, a handful of qualities show up reliably in the courses people genuinely learn from:
- It's honest about who it's for. A specific audience, a specific level. Generic "CPD for everyone" is rarely useful for anyone.
- It teaches something. Not just summarises, not just rebadges existing guidance — actually changes what the learner would do.
- It's current. Reflects practice as it is now, not as the slide deck was when first made.
- It treats the learner as a professional. No padding, no fake interactivity, no "click here to continue" theatre.
- It admits its scope. Says what it doesn't cover, where to go next, what the open questions are.
06
Where we fit in.
We're not a regulator and we don't issue licences. We don't dictate how much CPD anyone has to do, or what counts toward their professional body's requirements — those rules belong to those bodies, and you should follow them.
What we do is read CPD material people send us, and mark the kind of thing we'd be glad to learn from. A small, free, editorial mark — useful to providers who want a second pair of eyes, and useful to professionals who'd rather know whether the course in front of them has been looked at by someone other than the person selling it.