Everything people actually ask about CPD accreditation — including the questions most accreditation bodies would rather not answer. If yours isn’t here, ask us: explaining what the standards require is always free.
CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development: structured learning that maintains or develops professional competence after formal education ends. It is how professionals stay safe, current and employable through a working life.
In the UK it is not optional for a large slice of the workforce: CPD is mandatory for around 1.5 million people registered under 32 regulated professional titles — nurses, doctors, solicitors, accountants, surveyors and many more — and expected by professional bodies and employers across most other sectors.
It means an independent scheme has assessed a course against its published standard, and the course met it. With us, that covers how the learning is designed, taught, written, assessed and supported — checked by an assessor who completes the course as a learner, with the decision computed from fixed rules rather than chosen.
What it is not: a government licence. CPD accreditation is not regulated by the state, so the value of any badge depends entirely on the rigour of the scheme behind it. That is why we publish how we work, run a live register, and publish our refusal numbers — so you can check rather than trust.
No — and any scheme that implies otherwise is overclaiming. No accreditation body is expert in every subject it accredits, so none can honestly verify that every claim in every course is true.
What good accreditation checks is that a credible accuracy process exists: a named expert with provable credentials has reviewed and signed off the content, factual claims trace to identifiable sources, and there is a real cycle for keeping material current. Responsibility for the facts themselves stays with the provider — ours warrant their content’s accuracy as a condition of holding the mark. We believe we are unusually blunt about this boundary; we would rather you know exactly what the badge means.
No. Qualifications in the UK are regulated by Ofqual (and its national equivalents) and sit on the Regulated Qualifications Framework. CPD accreditation is a different thing: independent recognition that a learning activity meets a quality standard.
A CPD certificate evidences professional learning — valuable, countable towards professional-body requirements, but not a regulated qualification. Honest certificates never blur that line, and never imply a licence to practise. Ours are required to say exactly what happened: attendance, completion, or assessed achievement.
Legally, in the unregulated CPD market — very little. None of those words has a protected meaning here, which is why they get used interchangeably and why comparing schemes by vocabulary is a dead end.
What actually separates schemes is substance. Are the standards visible? Does a real assessment happen — does anyone complete the course? Can certificates be verified by anyone, instantly? Does the scheme ever refuse, and will it show you the numbers? Judge the scheme, not the word it chose.
They are all ways of expressing learning time. One CPD hour should mean one hour a typical learner genuinely needs to complete the learning — not the video runtime, and not a padded number that looks impressive on a certificate. Most schemes treat one point or one credit as one hour.
Because inflated hours are one of the commonest forms of CPD dishonesty, we independently recalculate every course’s stated hours during assessment. A claim that runs well ahead of reality does not pass.
Usually, as evidence of learning time — but every professional body sets its own CPD rules, so always check yours. Most UK bodies let members count relevant structured learning from any credible source.
Where accreditation earns its keep is auditability: a certificate carrying honest hours and a verifiable ID is easy to defend if your professional body ever samples your CPD record.
The evidence says yes — when the accreditation is real. UK employers spent £53 billion on training in 2024, but that spend is falling in real terms, which means buyers are choosing harder and trust signals decide who wins the work. Around 1.5 million UK professionals are required to evidence CPD, so accredited hours remove friction for exactly the learners who must spend on training. And in an industry survey, 80% of training providers said CPD accreditation had a positive impact on their business.
The caveat matters: a badge from a scheme that never refuses anyone adds nothing, and buyers increasingly know the difference. We’ve gathered the numbers, sources and charts on one page: Is CPD accreditation worth it? The evidence.
Increasingly, yes. Corporate and public-sector procurement routinely asks how training quality is assured, and accredited CPD is a standard way to answer. In crowded markets it is often the tiebreaker between lookalike courses.
The deeper shift is verification. A certificate anyone can check against a public register in seconds beats a PDF logo nobody can check. If a buyer cannot verify your badge, its value to them is close to zero — which is why every certificate we accredit carries a unique ID that resolves on our public register.
CPD as a concept is understood in most professional markets worldwide, and hours-based certificates travel well as evidence of structured learning. But there is no global CPD regulator, so no scheme can honestly promise universal recognition — be wary of any that does.
What genuinely travels is verifiability: a certificate that resolves to a live public register can be checked from anywhere on earth. That is more than most local paper certificates can offer.
Because schemes sell very different things. At one end, a fee buys a logo file and a light-touch document review. At the other, it buys a real assessment: someone completes your course as a learner, tests your support routes, recalculates your hours — and can say no. Assessment is the expensive part, which is why cheap accreditation is cheap.
The question to ask any scheme is not the price but what the fee buys. With us it buys the assessment itself, payable whether or not you pass. That separation between money and outcome is precisely why a pass means something.
Anyone may apply; not everyone passes. Refusal is a real outcome of our process, decided by fixed published rules rather than negotiation, and we publish our refusal statistics every year. A scheme that never says no is not a standard — it is a subscription.
If you are not sure you would pass, take the free readiness check first. It is anonymous, honest, and will tell you whether to apply now or fix a few things first — before you spend anything.
Six standards, in plain terms: does the course teach something real; is it genuinely taught rather than just presented; are the materials professionally made and accessible; can any tests and certificates be trusted; does the provider listen to its learners; and is the organisation behind it real and honest. The full detail is on the framework page.
Every applicant receives the complete framework — every check and the scoring rules our assessors work to — before assessment begins. You are never judged against anything you haven’t seen.
Three years, with an annual quality review in between: each year the provider shows its learner feedback, complaints record and what changed, and we sample the live course for drift. Certificate-verified feedback from real learners feeds the same review.
There is no automatic renewal and no renewal invoice — renewal is a fresh assessment the provider opts into. Accreditation you cannot lose is not accreditation.
If the gaps are fixable you get one deferral: a precise list of what to fix, eight weeks to fix it, then a re-check and a final decision. There is no second deferral and no negotiation.
If the application is refused you receive a full written report explaining exactly why — genuinely useful even if you never reapply. The assessment fee is not returned, because it paid for the assessment, not the outcome. We also never sell consultancy on passing our own assessment; explaining what the standards require is free, to everyone, always.
Yes — AI is a tool, and we assess the course, not the toolchain. Plenty of well-made courses now use AI in drafting, media production or quizzing.
What cannot be delegated to a model is accountability. A named human expert must still review and sign off the content; factual claims must still trace to identifiable sources rather than an AI’s say-so; and the provider still warrants that the content is accurate and lawful. AI-generated material that no qualified person has verified is exactly the kind of course that fails.
Ask for the accreditation number and check it against the scheme’s public register. Ours takes seconds, needs no account, and shows exactly what is accredited, its current status and its expiry: verify a certificate here.
If a badge cannot be verified anywhere, treat it as decoration. And if a number appears on a certificate but not on the register it claims to come from, please report it — misuse of an accreditation mark is sanctionable, and we act on it.
Suspension or withdrawal appears on our public register, with the history — because a register that only ever shows good news is marketing, not a record. The provider must stop using the mark immediately.
Learners are protected: certificates issued while the accreditation was valid remain verifiable. Something you earned honestly never silently disappears.
Your name; the exact course title as accredited; the CPD hours; the completion date; the provider; and a unique ID anyone can verify against a public register.
Just as important is what it claims. A certificate should say attendance or completion when that is what happened, and achievement only when something was genuinely assessed. A “certificate of achievement” for watching videos to the end is an overclaim — and a warning sign about everything else the provider says.
For most UK professional bodies, yes — provided the learning is relevant to your role. Most bodies count relevant structured learning from credible sources; rules differ, so check your body’s CPD policy for hours, cycles and any restrictions.
Where accreditation helps you personally is evidence: verified hours, an honest certificate and a checkable register entry make your CPD record easy to defend if it is ever audited.
A certificate records something that happened, so it does not expire: you completed that course on that date, and with us that stays verifiable — even if the provider later leaves the scheme.
Three separate clocks are worth knowing about, though. The course’s accreditation runs for its own three-year term. Your professional body counts CPD within its own yearly or rolling cycle. And knowledge itself dates — which is why accredited courses must show when their content was last reviewed.
Yes — anyone can, including learners. Every provider we accredit must publish its own complaints procedure and a fair refund policy, so start there.
If that fails, or your concern is about the accreditation itself, complain to us: complaints are logged, investigated, and feed directly into that course’s annual quality review. You can also leave certificate-verified feedback — it reaches both the provider and our reviewers, and your name never goes to the provider.
Ask five questions any honest scheme should welcome:
1. Can I see the standards before I pay?
2. Does a real assessment happen — will someone actually complete my course?
3. Can anyone verify a certificate against a public register?
4. Do you ever refuse — and will you show me the numbers?
5. Is the fee for the assessment, or for the outcome?
A no, a dodge, or silence on any of these tells you what the badge is really worth. Our answers to all five are on this site — and checkable.