CPD

CPD, or continuing professional development, is the learning that doctors, engineers, accountants, lawyers and many other professionals must record to keep their licence or membership. Events matter because sessions are a common source of CPD points or hours: a professional body might award one point per hour of accredited learning. That turns attendance into evidence, so organisers need to know who attended which session and for how long, and to issue a certificate that the professional body will accept.

CPD is the UK and Commonwealth term. US professions use CE for continuing education, CEU for continuing education units and CME for continuing medical education, and each regulator sets its own rules. Some require an event to be accredited before it is advertised, and some want an accreditation number on every certificate, so check the rules before the programme goes to print.

In eventcloud today, session scanning logs each person's first entry to a session, and the session's attendee list downloads as a spreadsheet for your records, though without exit scans it cannot measure hours in the room. Coming soon: attendance certificates and CPD credits.