AIPG’S CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
try, society committee meetings, men- toring, public outreach activities, and similar efforts.
The GSL has published a “Mind Map” of its CPD activity areas that is reproduced as Figure 1. As the revised GSL CPD program notes, “Because an attempt is being made to classify and group a wide range of diverse things [CPD activities], it is necessarily an artificial and imperfect grouping; there are other equally valid ways of ‘slicing the cake’.”
factor, something more CPD programs are moving towards, eliminates the need to make arbitrary choices.
Ethics Hours: professional ethics hours can be acquired in one of the listed CPD activities. Webinars or ses- sions at a local or national professional society meeting can be devoted to profes- sional ethics. Reading the “Professional Ethics & Practices” column and other articles addressing ethical issues in The Professional Geologist are an obvious private reading form of acquiring ethics
CPD Activity” portion of the worksheet, and record the hours. The one change would be that “# hours” and “% activity” columns should not total or calculate the PP hours (even) though the total PP hours can be shown.
AIPG’s CPD log.xlsx Workbook
Figure 2 shows the top of a worksheet in AIPG’s CPD log.xlsx workbook. The workbook is designed with the idea that
Figure 2. The top of a worksheet in AIPG’s CPD log.xlsx workbook
Interestingly, activities that AIPG cat- egorizes as “Contributing to Knowledge” are categorized as “Professional Practice” by the GSL; see the upper left of Figure 1. What the GSL categorizes at “On the Job” and much of what is in “Other” are activities I would categorize as professional practice. The point is that categorization can be tricky. More impor- tant that assignment to a particular CPG activity is the description of what you were doing in the Summary of CPD Activity column of the CPD log. Experience shows that a particular activ- ity could be counted in two or more of the above CPD activities. For example, if you prepare and present a webinar, the hours spent in preparation and pre- sentation of the webinar could be logged under SC, short courses and webinars, or CK, contributing to knowledge. Pick a category. The summary of the CPD activity should let reviewers/auditors know what you were doing. Assigning all CPD activities the same weighting
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Jul.Aug.Sep 2017
credit. For this reason, ethics hours are recorded as one of the 7 CPD activities and also are separately tracked for reporting ethics hours. This is discussed below in “Keeping track of your CPD activities.”
Professional Practice Hours: Some CPD programs also track and give credit for professional practice activities, for the time spend doing your job (your billable time). This recognizes that we learn new things with each new assign- ment or even with periodically revisiting a previous assignment for which new information is available. Professional practice time is one activity that is usu- ally discounted fairly substantially to make it more comparable with other CPD activity hours. Currently, the AIPG CPD program does not track professional practice hours, but this could change. If you want to track professional practice hours, it is easy to add an additional CPD activity, PP, to the CPD activities, insert an additional row into the “Summary of
each year’s CPD activity will be reported on a separate worksheet on which the prior years’ CPD can be entered to keep track of the 3-year rolling average of CPD hours. A separate tab for each year allows one workbook to keep track of multiple years of CPD in one place. The “Blank worksheet” tab can be copied into a new tab for each new year. The Summary of CPD Activity section at the top of each worksheet has columns con- taining cells that automatically calculate the number of hours and occurrences of each type of CPD activity engaged in dur- ing the year. Filling out this workbook is explained in the next section.
Keeping Track of Your CPD Activities
The experience of working with vari- ous professional organizations’ CPD pro- grams reveals that the most difficult part of CPD reporting is keeping a log of one’s CPD activities. Updating a CPD
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