As a member of CIBSE you are required by the Code of Professional Conduct to maintain your professional competence; this is across all Licentiate, Associate, Member and Fellow grades.
CIBSE's mycareerpath portal allows you to record your CPD in one place and link your progress and activities to your set objectives.
The recommended planning and review cycle is an effective tool to help you to determine and reach your set objectives and ensure you capture and record your CPD effectively throughout the year. Consisting of six phases, this cycle is the same for professionals from most backgrounds, disciplines and working environments, and applies at most ages and stages of your career. You can use it as a flexible tool to help you structure what you do. This will benefit you in the long term and serve as a record.
The Review and Planning Cycle
Identify your objective: Identifying objectives helps you to focus on what you want to achieve. Setting a timeframe also gives you the motivation to do that and allows you to manage your time and resources more efficiently.
Something to think about when setting your objectives is to use SMART objectives:
- Specific: making your objectives clear, helping you to focus on why your objective is important.
- Measurable: this helps you to stay on track and keep you motivated.
- Achievable: objectives need to be realistic and attainable in order to reach them.
- Relevant: ensuring that your objective works in line with what you want to achieve, as well as your other objectives.
- Timely: by setting a target date, this will help to give you a clear deadline making your objective more achievable.
Determine the skills and knowledge you need: Awareness of what the job demands, as well as good self-knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses is required in order to determine the skills and knowledge you need.
Plan to achieve: The plan you draw up will take into account the learning opportunities available, the time and resources you have at your disposal and, again, a realistic projected date for completion. Be aware of all the demands on your time and energy, including those outside of work.
Log and record: Logging your activities and recording your learning are two distinct activities. The first requires a simple factual record of what you did, when and where, how many hours spent, sufficient to trigger your recollection of the event. An entry in your diary or planner may be all that is required. (A useful tip would be to log your activities as they occur, this will help you to avoid forgetting what you have done. If you are selected for CIBSE audit, it may be difficult to try and remember all of your activities for the year). The second requires more thought: what new skill or knowledge have you acquired?
Review, evaluate and reflect: The review stage asks you to compare the learning you have achieved with the objectives you set yourself.
When recording your CPD in mycareerpath, you will be prompted to answer the following questions for each activity:
- What did I learn from this activity?
- How will I apply this learning to my work?
- How will I further develop this learning to meet any gaps in my knowledge, skills and understanding?
Inevitably some of what you have achieved will have been opportunistic and unplanned. How does where you are now affect your future aims and plans?
Using mycareerpath
Download this user guide or watch the video for guidance.
To access mycareerpath, log in to your MyCIBSE profile and click the MyCPD link in the header or mobile burger menu.