FISA introduced a CPD programme in 2013. FISA will start communicating with members who have not captured their records on the FISA website. Remember that, in your annual membership renewal, you are committing to compliance with the FISA CPD programme.
The CPD Programme Charter requires all members to spend sixty hours in a moving two year cycle on CPD. Of the sixty hours, five has to cover ethics, forty has to be done in the member’s area(s) of expertise, and forty has to be verifiable, i.e. some independent record must exist that the member spent the time in CPD.
As an example, Sue Goodmember specialises in deceased estate administration. She must spend forty hours over two years attending workshops, seminars, in-house training course, formal education, reading technical material, etc. in this field. Of the other twenty hours, five must be spent on ethics, and the other fifteen can be spent on any fiduciary related topics, e.g. tax, behavioural finance, investments, etc. She must spend forty hours during this time on verifiable activities, i.e. workshops, training, seminars, on any of the topics. The other twenty hours can be spent on non-verifiable activities like reading, listening to podcasts, watching financial television channels, etc. In other words, the verifiability requirement and the area of speciality requirement will overlap to some extent.
When talking to members about the “burden” of CPD, it becomes clear very soon that most members do a lot more CPD than they realise. It is a question of keeping record and logging activities on your member profile on the FISA website. If you have forgotten your log-in details, a process exists to reset them.