Practising financial advisers – or those involved with insurance distribution or delivering pension transfer advice – must do CPD. Paraplanners and or mortgage advisers should also keep up with what’s happening in the industry. Sue Wiggins, LIBF’s CPD Manager, shares her tips for where to find and how to approach CPD.
1. Plan ahead
Don’t leave your CPD until the last minute. If you do, it becomes a ‘tick box’ exercise, which you will resent using up your time for.
Allocate time for CPD in your working week or month.
2. Choose carefully
Think about your skills gaps and what you need to learn for your job. Remember that sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, so it’s worth discussing CPD with colleagues to get ideas on what might be useful.
Similarly, share any good CPD finds with your peers or colleagues. Don’t limit this to your firm. Why not go out there on social media to your fellow advisers.
3. Build on your expertise
You may also want to build your skills and knowledge in an area where you’re quite expert. There’s always more to learn.
Or you might take further qualifications to refresh knowledge or gain new understanding. Many of our programmes contain bite size units or modules that you can study on a stand-alone basis for CPD.
For example, if you hold the Diploma in Financial Advice (DipFA) the Level 6 Financial Planning in Retirement qualification will help you advise clients who are close to, or already in, retirement.
4. Think about your learning style
Choose CPD which suits your learning style, whether that’s visual, audio or face to face at an event.
And let your firm know your learning style preference, so they can accommodate it in any in-house CPD or team training.
5. Choose good quality structured CPD
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently withdrew their guidance requirement for structured CPD to be a minimum of 30 minutes. However, they require firms to demonstrate how bitesize learning is good quality and meets overall objectives for CPD – including by enhancing advisers’ knowledge and skills.
We offer online structured CPD covering several areas, in a variety of formats, including written, video and audio. At the end of an activity, you can use reflective exercises and testing to generate evidence of your CPD hours.
You can also claim CPD for attending some webinars and events, and listening to podcasts. But remember your CPD needs are unique to you so check with your professional body or employer to verify if something counts towards your CPD hours.
For example, at LIBF if it’s a one hour webinar, you can claim one hour of CPD. There’s a link to CPD certificates in our post-event emails, so that if it’s relevant to your CPD requirements you can download it afterwards.
6. Look about for unstructured CPD
Industry press is a great place to find articles to read for unstructured CPD. The key here is to make sure you’re interested in what you’re reading. It should also be relevant to your current role or help further your ambitions for your career.
If you study with us – or you’re a Member – you’ll find journals, reference sources and books on our e-library, KnowledgeBank. Members and subscribers also have access to Financial World, which is full of thought-provoking commentary and available in both digital and audio formats.
7. Log your CPD
It’s important to keep clear records of your CPD and save website addresses and articles in case you need to refer back to them. If you’re a Member of LIBF, you can use the MyCPD log in your MyLIBF account to record your CPD hours.
This article was first published on LIBF Insights.
