CPD must be more than a tick box excercise

The focus of the FCA is on advisers taking their Continuous Professional Development (CPD) more seriously, and not just treating the requirement to keep their knowledge up to date as a tick-box exercise. Some firms view CPD as a necessary evil, but while ensuring that they meet the minimum time requirements to comply with the regulations might have been acceptable until now, the new regulatory regime requires firms to set clear benchmarks for competence, and use these to drive training requirements and CPD planning.

Our online courses and assessments
Our online course and use of assessments to confirm knowledge provides a quantifiable benchmark for technical competencies that can drive each adviser’s training needs and plans, and that will satisfy the requirements of the regulators under the new regime.

Financial news element of our CPD system
The financial news element of our CPD System provides advisers with concise and unbiased reporting of financial services related news and regulatory developments.

We research and analyse core information from a variety of sources including HMRC, FSA, ONS, government websites and press reports over the month. We then prepare a succinct online summary of the previous months most relevant finance related news and deliver this to you at the end of the month, together with a 10 question assessment to confirm your understanding. This counts as 1.5 hours of structured CPD each month.

Our aim is not only to provide you with the most up to date and relevant industry news, but to deliver and present this information to you in a format that helps you to assess its importance and relevance to you and your clients. So, with this in mind, each of our monthly news summaries are conveniently separated into 8 subject headings: compliance, economy, mortgages, pensions, protection, savings & investments and taxation & trusts and ‘miscellaneous’.

You no longer have to read numerous lengthy reports, news articles and press releases to find the key facts that you need to know. We know from the extensive research that we carry out to prepare our monthly summaries how tedious and time-consuming this can be and, as they say, time is money. So we do all of that for you; sifting out the spin, speculation and biased opinions, giving you just the pertinent and relevant facts that you can’t afford to miss. Our summaries are succinct, relevant and interesting and will save you a considerable amount of time each month. Furthermore, the time you spend reading them, along with assessment results are included on your CPD certificate.

Over 300 CPD hours available
In addition, our CPD System provides you with access to 16 online courses; an extensive and invaluable library of material amounting to over 300 hours of available CPD, around which you can plan your own annual CPD requirements.

All of this information is at your fingertips, easily accessible on our online system, where you can also view recent news as well as the news summaries and assessments covering the previous six months.