Continuing Professional Development (CPD) obligations exist to help ensure that qualified professionals maintain their competence to practice. This is true in countless professional sectors in the UK.
At its very basic level, CPD is for consumer protection. It is also a way of ensuring that architects keep up-to-date within a rapidly changing profession. CPD should also enhance an architect's current and future development (professionally, personally and for staff within a business).
All chartered members of the RIBA are obliged to do CPD every year. This is true no matter where in the world the member lives or what sort of work is undertaken. Only fully retired members are exempt from this obligation.
Chartered members of the RIBA are required to do the following each year:
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at least 19.5 hours per year from the RIBA's prescribed core curriculum for CPD
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at least 15.5 hours of professional development in other subjects relevant to your own CPD needs
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record activity via the RIBA's CPD record sheet (preferably online)
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plan CPD via the RIBA's professional development plan (preferably online)We ask that, wherever possible, at least half of your yearly total is structured.
The RIBA will, at the end of every year, monitor a random sample of chartered members' CPD. We will ask to see CPD record sheets. It would be helpful to see professional development plans as well.
If you are on maternity or paternity leave, unemployed, on long term sick leave, not involved in architecture or construction, or are semi-retired, it would normally be sufficient for you to undertake your CPD obligations to keep up to date by way of reading, internet or other research, or, where possible, online or distance learning.
The Architects Registration Board (ARB) provides architects and those intending to register with an approach to maintaining competence, as well as the steps that individuals may take in order to demonstrate that they are competent to practice as an architect. Information on their guidelines on competence can be found on the Architects Registration Board| website.
The RIBA's CPD programme helps keep its members and other construction professionals up-to-date with training support, new ideas and updates.
We can offer advice and bring quality CPD through seminars and courses in our regional offices, our Northern Region CPD club, our certificate courses, such as project management, at conferences at Portland Place and elsewhere, and through the acclaimed free RIBA CPD Providers Network.
More specific details on your obligations can be found in the RIBA CPD - FAQs| page.