How can you record your CPD?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is the process of improving professional skills and knowledge. This can be through structured or unstructured learning and can include any on the job training and development.

Through completing CPD, you are establishing grounds for credibility and building confidence in your work. You can support your own career by learning new skills relevant to your goals. It also allows you to reflect on the gaps in your knowledge and become more competent and innovative.

FCA regulation, SYSC 28.2 and TC 2.1., require firms to ensure that all relevant employees possess the appropriate knowledge and ability to complete their tasks and perform their duties adequately. The Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) specifies that anyone involved in ‘insurance distribution’ for general insurance, must maintain the minimum necessary knowledge of eight core competencies and be able to provide evidence of their compliance through proper record keeping.

The Development Zone course catalogue contains a wealth of material, relevant to the IDD core competencies (terms and conditions of policies offered, applicable laws, claims handling, complaints handling, assessing customer needs, the insurance market, business ethics standards, and financial competence).

Additionally, the recording of CPD is central to the Development Zone, allowing you to record courses completed on the platform, as well as any professional development completed elsewhere.

As a minimum, a complete Development Zone CPD record will contain each of the following:

• A description of the activity (this will either be the title of the DevZone course, or the external activity).
• The activity type (i.e., gap analysis, webinar, reading material, on the job training, etc).
• Whether the activity is structured or not.
• The objectives of the activity.
• Any development needs identified.
• The start, due, and completion date, and time taken.
• A reflection statement (this does not need to be a novel, just a brief statement of what you took from the activity and how it has benefitted your professional development).
• You will also be able to attach any documents supporting the completion of the CPD activity (if applicable).

You may also have seen that the Development Zone is moving to a new updated platform. During the creation of the new site, the client support team looked at how the current CPD recorder works to see how we could improve on the recording process for the end user.

One thing we have introduced on the new platform, is that you can now select any IDD competencies that have been met through the activity completed, by simply selecting the relevant competency from a list. This will allow you to ensure all regulatory required areas of learning have been covered at the end of the CPD year.

Additionally, if you don’t have time to record your CPD immediately after completing a course, all the relevant course completion data will now be stored onto the system for when you log back in. The next time you have a chance to record CPD, you will be able to select any of your completed DevZone courses, and the system will auto-fill much of the required information. This will create a more efficient recording journey and ensures all the relevant details are captured.

On the Record CPD dashboard, you will find an overview of all records completed, a breakdown of the types of activities undertaken, and be able to see, at a glance, the IDD competencies that you have met and those which are still outstanding.

A table is also available that shows a quick view of your CPD hours. It will display the amount of time completed so far, the outstanding time left to meet your target, and you will now also be able to view the expected hours of CPD, as of the stage in your CPD year that you are logged in. This has been introduced to encourage users to complete CPD throughout the months and not rush their training and development towards the end of the year.

You will still be able to download your CPD records, either in a PDF or CVS (spreadsheet) format. For any existing DevZone users, we have ensured that during the migration process, all previous CPD records completed on the current Development Zone are still available to the user, so no loss of records will occur.

If you are a current Development Zone user, keep an eye out for upcoming communications detailing your transfer to the new platform.

OR if you would like to find out more about how the Development Zone can make learning and development easier, visit The Aviva Development Zone.