Who owns your CPD record when you leave a job?

The uncomfortable answer: the obligation is yours, the platform is usually theirs.

Two different things get confused

Your CPD obligation is personal. It attaches to you as a registrant or member, follows you between employers, and does not pause because you changed jobs. If you are audited, you are the one asked, not your former employer.

The records held on an employer system are the employer's records of training they provided. Completion data on an LMS, attendance registers, mandatory training compliance reports - these are operational records belonging to the organisation, held on a system they license.

Your account on that system is typically deprovisioned at, or shortly after, your leaving date. Sometimes the same day.

Does GDPR help?

Partly. Training completion data about you is personal data, and you can make a subject access request to a former employer. In practice this gives you a data export, often as a spreadsheet or PDF, sometimes months after you needed it, and rarely in a form that resembles a usable CPD record. It is a fallback, not a plan.

What you actually lose

• Dates and durations for years of internal training
• Certificates you never downloaded
• Mandatory training completion records that new employers ask for
• Any reflection you wrote inside the platform

The last one hurts most, because it is the part that cannot be reconstructed.

What to do before you leave

Give yourself a week and work through this:

1. Download every certificate available on the LMS
2. Export or screenshot your training history with dates and durations
3. Copy any reflections or development plan content out into your own document
4. Save appraisal documents that reference your development
5. Note the contact details of anyone who might act as a confirmer or referee later
6. Move all of it into personal storage - not a work-linked cloud account

Do this in your notice period, while you still have access. After the leaving date it becomes a favour you have to ask for.

What to do instead, permanently

Keep your own record from the start, in an account that belongs to you personally. Log the employer training in it as it happens, alongside everything else. The LMS then becomes a convenience rather than a dependency, and your record does not have a hard stop the day you resign.

This matters most for people who move often: agency and locum staff, contractors, teachers moving schools, anyone in a sector with high turnover. Four employers in six years can mean four inaccessible partial records and no continuous history at all - exactly the thing revalidation and audit are asking you to produce.

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.