Phase 3 · Complete your IPD

Continuing professional development

What ICE requires, what counts, and how to keep a record that is useful rather than defensive.

Who this is for:Candidates at any stage ·Mentors ·Supervising Civil Engineers and Delegated Engineers

CPD is assessed. It appears in your submission, in the Professional Commitment attribute, and often in the interview — and the thing reviewers look at is not the hours but whether the learning changed anything.

What you have to submit with a Professional Review application

Institution of Civil Engineers

A development action plan (DAP) detailing your objectives for the next 12 months.
A personal development record (PDR). If you have formal ICE IPD completion, going back a minimum of one year from the application date. For all other applicants, a minimum of three years.
The record must include current formal training related to health, safety and welfare.
ICE expects to see at least 30 hours of effective learning recorded per year. If you do not have this, you must provide a very robust explanation in your submission, and be able to show how you have maintained your competence if asked.
CPD records are not included in the appendix page limits or the report word count.

CPD expected: 30hours of effective learning per yearWhere you have less, ICE expects a robust explanation in the submission and expects you to show how competence has been maintained.
Development action plan: 12months of objectives ahead
Personal development record — formal ICE IPD completion: 1year minimum, back from the application date
Personal development record — all other applicants: 3years minimum, back from the application date
Health, safety and welfare training: current formal training must appear in the recordStated for both Professional Review and Career Appraisal CPD records. It is one of the most common gaps.

From Incorporated and Chartered Professional Review Guidance, Institution of Civil Engineers.

What counts

More than most people record. ICE's Training Scheme guidance encourages trainees to look beyond the minimum: promoting corporate strategy, raising the profile of the profession, visiting local schools and universities. It says plainly that activities outside work — and even outside civil engineering — can contribute.

What matters is that something was learned and that it is relevant to maintaining or enhancing your competence. A structured course counts. So does a site visit where you finally understood how something is actually built, a standard you read properly for the first time, a lecture, a technical paper, a difficult project post-mortem, a language, a management qualification.

What is assessed

Benefit, not attendance. ICE tells SCEs to validate CPD by "assessing the benefits that have been gained, not merely certifying attendance". Your annual appraisal is supposed to check that a sufficient amount was undertaken, that a good mix of topics was covered, and that the full benefit of the training was achieved.

That is why the reflection column is the one that matters. "Attended BS 5975 course, 7 hours" is a row in a spreadsheet. "Attended BS 5975 course — I had been treating the temporary works coordinator role as an approvals step; I now understand what the design brief is supposed to contain and have rewritten ours" is CPD.

Fictional example

The same activity, recorded two ways

Fictional example — a two-day course on carbon assessment

Weaker

12–13 March. PAS 2080 carbon management training. 14 hours. Provider: external. Certificate attached.

Stronger

12–13 March. PAS 2080 carbon management training, 14 hours. Objective from my DAP: be able to run a carbon comparison without relying on our sustainability team. Benefit: I understood for the first time that our baseline was being set at the wrong point, which was flattering every option we tested. Applied on the Eastgate culvert options study in April — I reset the baseline to the do-minimum case, which changed the ranking of the top two options. Next: I want to understand the uncertainty in the A1 factors we are using, which I have added to my DAP.

Why — The second version shows a planned objective, a change in understanding, an application to real work with a consequence, and a next step that feeds back into the plan. It is also far easier to talk about in an interview, because it contains something that actually happened.

Templates

ICE publishes its own DAP and PDR templates with its CPD guidance, and where your route requires a particular format you should use ICE's. Queensferry provides its own planning templates in the templates library — they are organising tools, not ICE forms, and they are not an accepted submission format.

The CPD workspace is for keeping the record as you go, in this browser, and exporting it when you need it.