Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Guidance

The CPD scheme has been introduced to encourage and assist advisers to remain skilled and competent. The OISC will offer support and encouragement where it can, for example, by offering its training courses free-of-charge to all advisers through e-learning.

OISC-regulated advisers, like other professionals, need to continue learning as they must remain aware of developments, keep up-to-date with best practice and alert to ways in which they can improve the service they provide to their clients and to run their businesses more effectively.  The CPD scheme has been formulated to focus on ensuring that those advisers who the OISC has assessed as being competent remain so in a sector where rules and legislation frequently change.

The CPD scheme is associated with the Code of Standards on-going requirement for organisations to have training plans and will operate together with the OISCs Competence Assessment programme to encourage advisers to retain and/or expand their skills and knowledge.  However, an adviser will only be able to raise their level of regulation if judged competent to do so by the OISC and not through the CPD scheme.

We would expect advisers at the beginning of each year to review their skills and knowledge with regards to their work and business plans. They should then produce a Training and Development Plan for their CPD focusing on what they need to learn and how they might do this, for example, by attending classroom training courses, e-learning courses or even attending a conference.  A Training and Development Plan form is available to download from the OISC website.

We do not expect advisers to stick to this plan rigidly as long as they complete the requisite hours of CPD and courses undertaken are relevant to their business.  Although advisers can choose how they undertake their CPD, the OISC may recommend specific areas they feel should be improved upon, for example, areas identified through competence assessment or a complaint investigation.

Compliance with the scheme will be monitored by the CPD Co-Ordinator.

To assist advisers with their CPD the OISC has joined together with The Open University (OU) to offer OISC training courses on-line via the CPD website. The courses will be free-of-charge and available to those advisers who are required to comply with the scheme. We are also able to offer various OU management and personal development courses on-line, free-of-charge. These courses are not compulsory and are provided for advisers to take if they choose to.

The OU has developed an on-line learning platform to provide advisers with their own personal CPD portfolio.  This portfolio will not only record all CPD activity, but will also give access to the e-learning courses. 

All advisers are required to use their portfolio to record their CPD activity; therefore access to a computer and to the Internet is required.  An individual personal email address is required for access and privacy reasons.