What is CPD? (Continuing Professional Development)?

What is CPD? (Continuing Professional Development)
CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development. It is the process of learning, tracking, and documenting the skills, knowledge, and experience that you gain as you work.

Why is it important?
As with most professions, doing Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is mandatory for our Chartered Members.

So doing CPD helps us to be:

1: Competent
2: Professional
3: Informed with latest industry standards and products

CPDs are now one of the essential requirements in our professional’s careers as chartered architects. It’s designed to keep architects and construction professionals up-to-date with the right skills and core competence. Therefore at Vita, our aim is to use CPD in a structured manner to not only cover the core curriculum but to use it as a tool to explore the newest products and technologies.

So how is it structured?
CPD can be mainly split into ‘structured’ or ‘informal’.

Structured CPDs are traditional set courses, presented by a representative of the supplier company who provides a better understanding of a specific topic or technology.
Informal CPDs can, instead, be self-directed as reading, shorts videos, podcasts, etc.

What do we have to do as architects?
In order to comply with the RIBA standards, we need to undertake at least 35 hours of learning ( half must be ‘structured’ ) and 20 of them must come from the ten mandatory RIBA Core Curriculum CPD topics.

+ Architecture for social purpose
+ Health, safety, and well being
+ Business, clients, and services
+ Legal, regulatory and statutory compliance
+ Procurement and contracts
+ Sustainable architecture
+ Inclusive environments
+ Places, planning, and communities
+ Building conservation and heritage
+ Design, construction, and technology

What does it mean for me and where will we go from here?
So beyond the legislative and regulatory reasons behind CPD learning, smart technologies within the industry lead the way we should be considering the design from the outset of any project. This is why it’s so important for us to keep up to date with innovation within the industry using CPDs as a tool to research and apply the knowledge to the projects we have available to us.

Nowadays, it is vital for all qualified and future architects to stay relevant and up to date on new industry trends. CPDs are great in this sense and help us ensure that our multifaceted craft is considered from a wider perspective.

The hope I hold for our CPD structure is to gain knowledge about traditional topics to which I am still learning as a Part 1 architectural assistant. But it’s also to develop the system to discover and research the wider market that’s out there and available to us as architects.

So how does it relate to your work?
So one of our recent CPDs involved the timber panelling system Laudescher. They came to talk to us about the specification of acoustic timber panelling. Since then, we’ve had various discussions over the finishing type, application method and most importantly it’s potential specification! Here’s the result currently in construction at our gym proposal in Tandridge.