A plain list of what you can legitimately claim as CPD, what you cannot, and how to work out the hours when the activity does not come with a certificate.
Most people under-claim CPD, not over-claim. They log the two courses they attended and miss the fifteen other hours of genuine professional learning they did that year.
What counts
- Courses and training - in person or online, accredited or not
- Conferences and seminars, including the sessions you actually attended rather than the full programme length
- Webinars, live or recorded
- E-learning modules, including mandatory training
- Professional reading - journals, research, standards, guidance, technical books
- Podcasts and recorded lectures with a professional focus
- Mentoring and coaching, whether you are giving or receiving it
- Clinical or professional supervision
- Shadowing and observation of colleagues
- Being observed and acting on the feedback
- Delivering training or presenting - preparation time included
- Writing articles, guidance or procedures that required research
- Committee, panel or standards work where you learned something
- Audit, moderation and peer review
- Structured on-the-job learning - a new system, a new procedure, a case that stretched you
- Qualifications and academic study
What does not count
- Routine work you already knew how to do
- Time spent on admin around learning - booking, travel, chasing certificates
- Meetings with no learning content
- General news consumption and social media
- Anything with no relevance to your professional role
- The gap between sessions at a conference, and the lunch
- Learning you cannot describe afterwards
Working out hours when there is no certificate
Log the time you genuinely spent engaged, rounded to the nearest quarter hour. For a conference, count sessions attended, not the length of the day. For preparing and delivering training, most schemes allow preparation time as well as delivery - check yours, and record the two separately so you can adjust.
Be conservative on anything ambiguous. A record that looks inflated invites scrutiny across every entry.
The relevance test
Before claiming, ask: can I name something I now know, do, or think differently because of this? If yes, it is CPD and it is defensible. If no, it might have been useful, but it is not a CPD hour.
Do not forget the invisible hours
The most commonly missed CPD in any profession is the learning that happens through work itself: the complex case, the new regulation you had to get to grips with, the system migration, the incident review. It is legitimate CPD. It just never arrives with a certificate, so it never gets logged unless you make a habit of logging it.
Keep your CPD in one place
A record only helps if it exists before you need it. Our free CPD tracker logs an activity in seconds, tallies your hours automatically, keeps your reflections with the entry, and exports a clean PDF whenever you need evidence. Free for life for individuals - and the record belongs to you, not your employer.
Frequently asked questions
- What counts as a CPD hour?
- An hour of learning activity relevant to your professional role that you can describe the outcome of - including courses, reading, webinars, supervision, mentoring, observation and structured on-the-job learning.
- Does mandatory workplace training count as CPD?
- Yes, in most schemes, provided it is relevant to your role and you can say what you learned from it.
- Can I count travel time to a course as CPD?
- No. Travel, booking and administration around learning are not learning activity and should not be claimed.
- Does preparing training for others count?
- Usually yes. Most bodies allow preparation and delivery of training as CPD - record the two separately so you can adjust to your scheme's rules.
Read this next
- Formal vs informal CPD: what the difference actually meansFormal, structured, verifiable, participatory - different bodies use different words for broadly the same split. Here is what each means and why it matters.
- Do podcasts and webinars count as CPD?Both count, but they are treated differently. Webinars can often be formal or participatory; podcasts almost never are. Here is how to log each properly.
- How to write a CPD reflection - with three worked examplesA CPD reflection needs four things: what you did, what you learned, what you changed, and what is next. Here is the structure plus three worked examples.
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