In this guide
Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
ICE assesses CPD through your submission and the Professional Commitment attribute, and may ask about it at interview. Reviewers consider how the learning changed your practice as well as the recorded hours.
Activities that count
ICE encourages trainees to consider activities beyond the minimum, including promoting corporate strategy and the profession and visiting schools or universities. Activities outside work, including those outside civil engineering, can contribute.
Record what you learned and how it helps maintain or improve competence. Relevant learning can come from a course, site visit, standard, lecture, technical paper, project review, language study or management qualification.
Assessment of CPD
ICE instructs SCEs to validate CPD by "assessing the benefits that have been gained, not merely certifying attendance". Annual appraisals should consider the amount, range of topics and benefit of the learning.
An entry such as "Attended BS 5975 course, 7 hours" records attendance. Compare that with this fictional reflection: "Attended BS 5975 course — I had been treating the temporary works coordinator role as an approvals step; I now understand what the design brief is supposed to contain and have rewritten ours". It identifies the change in understanding and its application.
The same activity, recorded two ways
Fictional example: a two-day course on carbon assessment
12–13 March. PAS 2080 carbon management training. 14 hours. Provider: external. Certificate attached.
12–13 March. PAS 2080 carbon management training, 14 hours. Objective from my DAP: be able to run a carbon comparison without relying on our sustainability team. Benefit: I understood for the first time that our baseline was being set at the wrong point, which was flattering every option we tested. Applied on the Eastgate culvert options study in April — I reset the baseline to the do-minimum case, which changed the ranking of the top two options. Next: I want to understand the uncertainty in the A1 factors we are using, which I have added to my DAP.
The second version shows a planned objective, a change in understanding, an application to real work with a consequence, and a next step that feeds back into the plan. It is also far easier to talk about in an interview, because it contains something that happened.
Is your CPD submission-ready?
Templates
ICE publishes its own DAP and PDR templates with its CPD guidance, and where your route requires a particular format you should use ICE's. The Forum provides its own planning templates in the templates library: they are organising tools, not ICE forms, and they are not an accepted submission format.
The CPD workspace is for keeping the record as you go, in this browser, and exporting it when you need it.
Official sources
Selected publisher pages were rechecked in September 2026. Other source records were last checked in July 2026. Open the latest official document before relying on a requirement.