The assumption that in-person CPD is superior to webinar CPD is near-universal in AEC and largely evidence-free. It persists partly because in-person events feel more substantial — there’s a room, a host, sometimes food — and partly because webinar CPD proliferated fastest during a period when a lot of it genuinely was rushed and thin. But the format itself was never the variable doing the work. What actually determines whether a session is worth attending sits underneath the format question entirely.
What actually determines session quality.
Four things matter far more than whether a session happens in a room or on a screen: the specificity of application — how directly does the content connect to decisions the attendee is currently making, rather than general awareness of a topic; the quality of the case material — real projects and real failure modes, not marketing case studies dressed as technical content; relevance to the attendee’s live work, meaning the session was pitched at people actually facing this decision, not a generic audience; and the framing of the closing question — whether the session ends by prompting the attendee to think about what they’ll do differently, or simply ends. Format is a weak proxy for all four of these. A well-designed webinar with sharp case material and a closing prompt that asks attendees to name a specific action produces more durable value than an in-person session that’s essentially a product demonstration with sandwiches attached.
The Lunch & Learn problem, briefly.
The in-person session with catering has a specific failure mode worth naming: attendance can be driven by factors entirely unrelated to content quality, and the room setting can create an impression of substance — people sat down, gave their attention, ate lunch — that has nothing to do with whether anything changed. A webinar doesn’t have this problem, but it has its own: it’s easy to attend passively, in a second window, with genuine attention never fully engaged. Neither format solves the attention problem on its own. Both can be designed to solve it, and both can fail to.
What the research actually says.
Comparisons of synchronous online versus in-person professional training outcomes are mixed and heavily context-dependent — which is itself informative. If format reliably determined outcome, the research would show a consistent pattern in one direction. It doesn’t, because format isn’t the variable that predicts learning transfer. The psychological distance research sometimes cited in favour of in-person delivery — the idea that physically present learners are more present — has some support, but relevance to the attendee’s actual work consistently matters more in the underlying studies than physical presence does. A professional who’s mentally checked out in a physical room learns less than one who’s actively engaged with a webinar that speaks directly to a live decision they’re facing.
What this means in practice.
None of this is an argument that format is irrelevant — a badly designed webinar and a badly designed in-person session both fail, and there are format-specific failure modes worth avoiding in each. It’s an argument that format is the wrong first question. The right first question is whether the session’s content is specific enough, relevant enough, and structured to prompt action — regardless of the room it happens in or doesn’t.
FAQs
Not reliably, and the research comparing the two formats is mixed rather than conclusively favouring one. What determines whether a CPD session is worthwhile has more to do with the specificity of its content, the quality of its case material, and how directly it connects to decisions the attendee is actually facing — not the delivery format.
In-person sessions carry cues of substance — a physical room, a host, sometimes catering — that create an impression of value independent of content quality. Those cues can accompany genuinely excellent CPD, but they can equally accompany a thin session dressed up with a room and lunch. The cues and the content quality are separate things.
Whether the content connects specifically to a decision you’re currently facing, whether the case material is real rather than marketing-adjacent, and whether the session ends by prompting you to name something you’ll do differently. These questions apply equally to in-person and webinar sessions.
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