Below is a guide to the most commonly asked questions regarding Continuous Professional Development (CPD) for engineers.
Continuing Professional Development or CPD is the systematic maintenance, enhancement and development of knowledge and skill, and the development of personal qualities necessary for the execution of professional and technical duties throughout the practising engineering professional’s career. In short, it is the process of lifelong learning for professionals.
CPD includes a wide variety of learning activities, many of which are free.
If a learning activity contributes to your professional development, then it counts as CPD.
If you are a member with us, we will automatically add any CPD training courses you attend to your My CPD online record. We will also suggest other events you may have attended/be interested in attending to add to your record on your My CPD dashboard.
Events that count as CPD include:
On the event booking page, we will also list how many hours you can claim for attending a particular event.
The CPD calendar can be accessed from the "Events" section of the website. Once you have navigated to the events page, you can filter the search results to find upcoming CPD events that are relevant to your interests and needs.
The CPD hours associated with any Engineers Ireland course or event will be listed on our website on the event information page. CPD activities are measured in hours. Assuming a standard working day is 7 hours, one day’s CPD (e.g. a one-day training course) equals 7 hours CPD. CPD can be measured in a minimum of 30 minute chunks.
You can contact the CPD department at cpdtraining@engineersireland.ie. They will be able to assist you with any questions you have about events or training courses.
This is the name that identifies the learning activity. It could be a course title, the name of a site visit, a work presentation or a professional body committee meeting.
You cannot enter activities that you are planning to do in the future, only activities that you have completed. For an activity that takes place over a period of time you can record it in stages. For example, January 5th – March 10th, module 1 of a Diploma course, and then March 14th – May 26th module 2, etc.
This is the amount of time you devoted to that learning activity. You can count a maximum of 35 hours for one activity. If an activity is more than 35 hours you will need to break it down to component parts.
The minimum time period you can use is 30 minutes. Engineers Ireland suggests that Self-directed learning should count for no more than a maximum of 14 hours of your annual total.
Members should aim to undertake a balance of CPD activities across the different CPD categories.
There are many different learning activities that count as CPD. Engineers Ireland has identified 6 types of CPD:
This is the organisation that provides the CPD activity, so it could be your employer, a professional body such as Engineers Ireland, a training provider, the source of self-directed learning such as a professional journal or website, etc.
A competence is a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge, skills and attitudes for achieving observable results. Engineers Ireland has categorised competences for different membership grades – Chartered Engineer, Associate Engineer, Engineering Technician.
This feature may be useful if you are planning to apply for a professional title with Engineers Ireland. You can read more in the Registered Titles section.
You can add up to a maximum of 3 competences with an individual CPD activity.
Verification is any document or link that you may wish to use as support for a CPD activity. It could be a certificate of attendance or achievement for a course or a link to a Journal article. You can add PDF and JPG documents of up to 3MB.
This is available in the My Records section once you have recorded an activity.
You can export a record of your CPD Activities to you own computer to share/print.
If you already have a record of your CPD activities with another Professional Body, you can add this as an individual CPD Activity. You could choose a date range from January 1st to the current date.
You can declare a maximum of 35 hours (although you may have undertaken more than 35 hours CPD) Once you have recorded 35 hours’ CPD you will be prompted to make your CPD declaration for the year.
You can attach your record from the other Professional Body with this activity for verification purposes.