Continuing Professional Development
Everything CPD and the CILEx Membership Contact Centre
Yasmin Hussain talks through CPD and her experiences giving advice to CILEx members, and offers tips on how members can reach compliance.
About the author
Yasmin Hussain is a membership advisor in the CILEx Membership Contact Centre.
CILEx members undertake CPD to maintain, improve and extend the skills and qualities necessary for the proper performance of professional and legal duties, and attain the compliance required to ensure confidence in the professionalism and competence of our members.
Throughout the five years I have worked for the CILEx Group, I have had the pleasure of working with members to complete their CPD. I worked previously for CILEx Regulation, helping the CILEx-regulated community to achieve compliance, so I have gained a vast amount of knowledge and experience with CPD.
It is fair to say that, with change, we can all admit that not everyone likes having to go about things in a different way. I’m the same; once we are in a routine and know what we are required to do, it can be hard to adapt and follow a new process. Some changes should be seen as improvements, and I believe that the changes to the CPD requirements - moving to an outcomes-based scheme - were introduced to benefit members and the CILEx-regulated community. It has given our members more control, freedom and flexibility over what they would like to do for their CPD training.
Understanding the proposed changes to the CPD scheme, a few years ago, was initially difficult for some members. Members I have spoken to did not, at first, understand what they were required to do or find their requirements clear, even when reading the materials which were available, and still thought that they needed to complete a certain amount of CPD hours.
Through working with members, I have found that once the idea of an outcomes-based approach is understood, it becomes a lot easier to grasp how this can then be applied to your CPD requirements. They started to think about how the activity was going to benefit them, as a professional person, rather than how many CPD hours it would achieve and, as a result, members now make conscious decisions on what training they undertake.
Many members tell me that they are unable to achieve their CPD as their employer may not fund them to go on courses. We do not accredit CPD providers, therefore there are many different ways you are able to undertake CPD. Under the outcomes-based scheme, you also have a choice on what areas you want to cover, and so you have the opportunity to have a look at all the different ways these can be achieved.
With the introduction of the outcomes-based CPD scheme, we also brought in the idea of the ‘CPD cycle’. With this useful tool, you are asked to remember to ‘reflect, plan, act and evaluate’. If this cycle is followed, you are almost guaranteed to achieve compliance.
Reflect You will need to set your learning outcome; by doing this, you are looking at what you would like to update your knowledge/skills in.
Plan At this stage you are looking at how you will meet the outcome, and you need to decide which activity would do this best.
Act This is when you undertake the activity you have selected to meet your learning outcome.
Evaluate Explaining how the activity undertaken has enhanced you, as a professional person, to assist with the work you do and helped you to achieve your learning and development needs.
For Associate Prosecutors, Practitioners, Fellows and Graduate Members on the outcomes-based requirement, you need to complete at least nine CPD outcomes, with at least five of those outcomes being planned and one of those planned outcomes must be in professionalism.
- If you are an Associate Prosecutor, at least four of your outcomes needs to be focused on criminal practice.
- As a CILEx Litigation Practitioner and CILEx Advocate, at least two of your outcomes must relate to advocacy focused activities.
As an Associate Member, you would be required to complete at least eight hours’ CPD and one outcome in professionalism.
What is a planned outcome?
A planned outcome is as simple as it sounds; this would be the way you plan an activity based on meeting a specific outcome, following the CPD cycle.
What is an unplanned outcome?
An unplanned outcome would be what we call ‘unexpected learning’. We appreciate that there are times where you do not plan the learning outcome, and carry out an activity, on an ad hoc basis, that has just as much relevance. An example of an unplanned outcome is reading CILEx Journal: you were unable to plan a learning outcome for what might appear, but if you found that an article updated your knowledge in a certain area, then this can be counted.
What is professionalism?
Professionalism relates to competence and confidence in the broad range of skills, knowledge and experience that are part of the quality service for consumers of legal services, but are not necessarily focused on the law itself.
So, what could be counted? The outcome needs to develop or refresh your professional knowledge or skills in matters such as client care and communication skills, equality and diversity issues, business and social awareness, and time and resource management. This broad definition of professionalism, allows members to interpret what professionalism is relevant to you.
- Something which has become increasingly common is that members confuse ‘professionalism’ with ‘specialism'. With the outcomes-based scheme, the requirement for outcomes to be in a certain area of specialism were removed, so CPD can be in any area in which you may want to undertake training. With professionalism, we want to see an activity that is updating your knowledge as a professional person.
- The CPD cycle was introduced to change the way in which you think about your training. When reviewing members’ logbooks, we identified that they had not followed the cycle. The cycle was introduced to help you think about how you have benefitted from the training, and how you will put this into action, rather than about how it will be ‘relevant to my role’.
- On the online system, there is a box which is called ‘non-CPD’ ; if you tick this box, you are telling the system you do not want the entry to be counted towards your requirements. If you do want the activity to contribute towards your CPD requirements, then please leave this box unticked.
Tip 1: Plan, plan and plan some more
This is an obvious thing to say, but by actually taking some time at the beginning of the CPD year you will be able to look forward and see how you may want to update your knowledge, and what activities will help you with this.
It may be that you know there is some new legislation which is due to come into force in the next year, and by knowing about this you have established your learning outcome. From identifying this development point, you would then need to find a way to achieve this learning outcome, which could be by undertaking a course, webinar or in-house training, for example.
Tip 2: Always have a backup
As we all know, technology can be temperamental from time to time. I always strongly recommend that when members are logging their CPD, they may want to write this record up on a Word document initially, and then use the quick hack of copy and paste to transfer the information on to the online system. Also, if you were ever called for sampling, you would have this information to hand to produce as additional evidence.
Tip 3: Use myCareer
This is an exclusive member benefit for you, accessible through your myCILEx account.¹ I often have conversations with individuals where they tell me that their employer is not able to pay for external courses for them or that they do not have as much internal training, and it is really nice to be able to introduce these members to myCareer.
This new portal contains hundreds of career e-learning modules, which you can use to help meet your CPD requirements. So, I highly recommend that members take some time to see what modules may be of interest to them, and make use of this fantastic new tool.
Tip 4: Log as you go along
The dreaded deadline day, which always seems to come around quicker each year! As you know, the deadline for CPD is 30 September each year. This is another key date, and I recommend that if it is not in your diary already, it should be!
We all get busy and our schedules start building up, but by logging your CPD as and when you complete it, the process can become a lot less stressful.
If you keep all your outcomes until the end of the CPD year and then try and remember what you have done, the task becomes a lot more daunting and you will not really get the most out of the CPD cycle.
Tip 5: Expect the unexpected
In your day-to-day role, there are activities you undertake which could be counted towards CPD. For example, if you had a client meeting from which you had to go on to do further research about an area of law, this can count as an unplanned outcome. The reason being that you were not expecting to achieve this outcome when thinking about CPD; however, you have benefitted as a result and it has helped you to develop.
If you have not already been on our website, we have updated this with all new resources for the 2017/2018 CPD year.² There you will be able to find new CPD guides relevant to your grade of membership, step-by-step guides on how to log CPD, and evaluation documents. Additional resources will also be made available over the course of the coming months.
At the Contact Centre, we are always here to help you with any questions or queries you may have. We do understand that sometimes it is difficult to call during office hours, so as a benefit to our members we hold CPD clinics between 5 pm and 7 pm. Keep an eye out in our member newsletter to see when the next clinics are taking place; again, these are key dates to keep in your diary.
We are also now live on Instagram, and we put out useful tips for members on a variety of topics.³ Of course, CPD is heavily featured as a point of member interest, so please don’t forget to follow us @CILExHQ.
If you are on Twitter, then you can tweet us using #CILExHelp for any question that you may have for us.
1 Visit: www.cilex.org.uk/membership/mycareer
2 Visit: www.cilex.org.uk/membership/cpd
3 Visit: www.instagram.com/cilexhq
- 1 October CPD year begins
- 31 August final date to apply for an extension of time on CPD
- 30 September CPD year ends, final date to log CPD
Note: Dispensations can be applied for during the CPD year if you have been out of work for at least six months of the CPD year.
Note: Work-based Learning Reduction (Graduate Members only): if you have submitted your Work-based Learning Portfolio, you can apply for a reduction in your requirements to become five CPD outcomes.