For many of the UK organisations we work with, Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is an essential part of the services they offer or is the criteria for eligibility for membership or awards.

As such, over the years we’ve had many conversations about how CPD hours can be successfully logged within a CiviCRM environment to help both the end user and the organisation keep track of how many CPD hours an individual has recorded.

Today we’re proud to announce that we’ve built a robust CPD logging system with various interactions to help fulfil this requirement. Read on to find out more about what it does.

Your CPD Record

The brand new personal CPD record is available as part of the Compuco CiviCRM portal, a standard part of our CiviCRM installations. Beyond some basic details, it accounts for and lets your users log their CPD activities. This can be especially useful if your organisation gives out awards or accreditations based on CPD hours recorded.

Within this record you can see some basic details, a filterable graph of the user’s CPD progress, alongside an interface to log new hours and view any already tracked. Users can easily export their CPD record if they wish to have a copy of what they have logged.

There’s also the option to have a number indicating the user’s progress against your organisation’s target. This is a number which can be configured centrally by an administrator and can be left blank if desired in which case the target hours will not appear in the interface.

CPD hours are logged by category or type of learning. These are fully configurable by administrators, so if there is a particular category you wish to see, this is easily set up on the backend.

When logging hours you can submit a file as evidence of what you have achieved. This is encrypted so that only an assigned reviewer will be able to see it beyond the user themselves. Talking of which…

Reviewing with CPD

With CPD requirements often being an essential part of many organisations’ review process for qualifying for various awards or memberships, Compuco has designed this functionality with reviewers in mind. Not only can assigned reviewers have access to evidence files, but importantly administrators can set rules for CPD records to be locked during certain stages of processes.

If you wish, for instance, users to be able to no longer log CPD hours after the initial application and review, you can easily configure this in the backend. Once you have progressed through these steps, the user will automatically once again be free to log more hours.

Users’ identifying details can also be anonymised for reviewers to help ensure that reviews remain as free from bias as possible and focus only on whether or not applicants have met the required standards.

Anything else?

Yes actually! One major feature is that CiviCRM events can be assigned and automatically log CPD hours for your users. That saves your users a lot of time and can be really handy if your organisation is running various training programmes.

You can configure which statuses will cause someone to have hours logged against their name. So those marked as ‘no-show’ will not receive the hours for example. The system is also smart enough that it will automatically recalculate if someone who is marked as ‘attended’ is later amended to a ‘no-show’, saving you a lot of time!

How do I get access to this CPD functionality?

This CPD functionality is currently exclusive to CiviCRM sites with the Compuco portal, so if you’re interested in this, be sure to get in touch with us and find out more about it!

It will also be added in the coming months to CiviPlus, our simplified SaaS version of CiviCRM, which is designed as an out of the box package solution for growing organisations.