Recording your CPD

List your key responsibilities for your work role and the skills that you need to carry them out. Also include skills not in your current role but which you might wish to develop for your career.

Include the skills that you feel are vital to meeting the reasonable expectations of your clients and/or your organisation. Prioritise the top 5-7 skills and focus on those. If you carry out different CPD activities to those you had planned, in different areas, they can still be included in your record.

Members are encouraged to include responsibilities they would like to have as part of their career plans, thus linking CPD to both 'competence to practice' and career. All members should also include 'ethical behaviour' under their responsibilities.

Reflect on your capability (skill or knowledge) in carrying out those responsibilities. This could be through self-analysis, using our Personal Development Plan or discussion with a colleague. Decide where you feel you need to:

• Improve or update existing knowledge and skills – this could be to address a weakness you feel you have or to upgrade your skill or knowledge
• Develop new knowledge or skills – you may need to develop some new capability to meet a newly acquired responsibility or to develop some expertise in a specialist area.
• Having assessed your development needs now set some development objectives. The areas to consider are technical knowledge and ethics, but also business, management/leadership and personal skills.

Decide the best way to meet the objectives (coaching, research, in-house update and discussion, conference update, reading, webinar, course, qualification etc.) and select the activities.

Monitor the status of the chosen activities. Ask yourself - 'are they meeting my needs?'

Include at least one activity related to ethics (online course, conference workshop, reading articles).

You should evaluate how effective the activities have been. Would you use that type of activity again or choose something different next time?

You should then reflect on the impact the learning has had, your own progress and any new need arising and then link back to step two.

You may want to reflect on learning that was unplanned too - for example, managing a crisis provides an intensive learning experience.

If your regulator, employer or another professional body requires you to manage your CPD in terms of hours, you should include that as a measure on your CPD forms. The role benchmarking CPD scheme accommodates the use of hours as a measure and ensures the hours you spend are devoted to relevant learning activities.

STEP has chosen not to set a minimum number of hours that members must invest in 'formal' or 'structured' CPD, but the majority of balanced CPD plans will include a mix of structured and unstructured learning activities.

'Structured' or 'formal' CPD involves validation of knowledge through discussion with others, or some form of assessment to test what you've learnt. The following activities are examples:

• Attendance at conferences, seminars, webinars, workshops, discussion meetings or similar; events involving active contributions, organised by any provider;
• In-house training sessions or technical updates;
• Mentoring and coaching other practitioners or potential practitioners;
• Preparation of lectures, webinars or other forms of presentation;
• Writing books, articles or reviews for the benefit of others, whether for internal or external; publications/ websites. This includes writing for the STEP Journal or other STEP publications.

Any form of learning where there is no interaction with other individuals or assessment is classified as unstructured or informal CPD. This would include:

• Use of learning media (online and offline) where it is undertaken on a personal basis, in isolation and without completing any form of assessment.
• Informal, personal research which does not result in a report to clients, colleagues or any other possible audiences.
• Reading textbooks, articles or other written materials that develop a practitioner's skills e.g. trade publications and industry news in any format. The STEP Journal and newsletters are included.

STEP does not currently accredit external events. The onus is on individual members to judge whether a particular event is relevant to their role and their professional development needs.

Conference providers normally self-assess on an hourly basis and members should ensure they have attended for the whole conference, if they have chosen to record hours and wish to claim the full number of CPD hours for the event.