Why the May 2026 competence guidance changes what AEC professionals need to show.
In May 2026, a document was published that most AEC professionals have not yet read — but that their employers, professional bodies, and insurers almost certainly will.
The guidance is called Managing Competence in the Built Environment. It was produced by the Industry Task and Finish Group, formed in June 2025 and bringing together more than 50 professional bodies, industry organisations, and regulators — including BSI, HSE, RIBA, ICE, CIBSE, CIOB, and the Building Safety Regulator. Its reference is ITFG:01/26. Its framing matters: this is not a qualifications document. It is not about hours. It is explicitly, formally, and repeatedly about whether professional development produces demonstrable changes in how practitioners work.
Section 9.6 states that CPD “shall be purposeful, applied, and linked to measurable improvements in competence.” Section 9.6.2 requires that organisations evaluate whether CPD “genuinely improves performance and behaviour, rather than simply recording completion.”
For most AEC professionals, whose CPD record currently consists of session titles, hours logged, and accreditation logos, those two sentences represent a gap. This piece is about what that gap looks like, why it matters now, and what closing it actually requires.
What the guidance is — and why it has authority
The ITFG guidance is not a consultation document. It is not aspirational sector thinking. It is the product of the regulatory settlement that followed the Grenfell Tower Inquiry — one of the most consequential inquiries in UK construction history, whose Phase 2 Report found, in explicit detail, that specification and product knowledge failures were rooted not only in individual competence gaps but in organisations that lacked systems for ensuring competent people made competent decisions.
The Building Safety Act 2022 established the legal framework. The Industry Competence Committee (ICC) published 15 Principles for Competence Management in April 2026. The ITFG guidance is the practical implementation document — translating those principles into specific requirements for how AEC organisations plan, develop, evaluate, and document competence.
The authority behind it is not advisory. RIBA, ICE, CIBSE, CIOB, and the Building Safety Regulator are among its producers. When professional bodies begin updating their CPD frameworks — as they have begun to do — they will be referencing this guidance as the standard they are implementing. When clients include competence management requirements in prequalification questionnaires — as they will increasingly do — this guidance is what those requirements will be grounded in. When a PI claim is investigated and a loss adjuster asks what systems the practice had in place to manage competence, this guidance is the framework against which adequacy will be assessed.
The question is not whether the guidance will affect AEC professionals. It already does. The question is how quickly that effect becomes visible in the contexts that matter.
What it actually requires from individual practitioners
The guidance organises competence around a framework called SKEB — Skills, Knowledge, Experience, and Behaviours. These four dimensions, drawn from BS 8670-1:2024, define what competence means in the built environment context. The guidance is explicit that evidence of competence must span all four. An attendance record evidences none of them directly.
For individual practitioners, the guidance’s demands fall into three areas.
First: CPD must be linked to the specific competences required for your role — not generic hours logged against a professional body minimum. A fire engineer needs CPD linked to fire safety competence criteria. A structural engineer working on higher-risk buildings needs CPD that addresses the competences the Building Safety Act’s dutyholder regime requires. Accumulating hours in categories that look broadly relevant is not what the guidance is asking for.
Second: Development of competence requires evidence across SKEB — not attendance records alone. Section 9.6.2 is direct: organisations managing competence are expected to review whether CPD “genuinely improves performance and behaviour, rather than simply recording completion.” This is an instruction to employers to look past the certificate. The practitioner whose record only shows what they attended cannot support that review.
Third: The competence management cycle the guidance establishes — Plan, Do, Check, Act — requires at its Check stage that someone evaluates whether training is working. That evaluation requires evidence. The practitioner who can contribute structured evidence of what they intended to do differently after each session, and whether they did it, is in a fundamentally different position from one who cannot.
This is a change in kind, not just in degree. The hours-based CPD log was always an inadequate instrument for evidencing professional development. The guidance makes that inadequacy a formal governance requirement — not just an epistemological observation.
The gap between what practitioners currently record and what is now expected
This is not a new problem. AEC professionals have known for years, privately, that logging attendance is not the same as evidencing development. What has changed is that the regulatory and governance framework now says so explicitly — in language that employers, clients, and insurers will begin referencing in contexts that carry real consequences.
Consider what the next 12 to 24 months look like as the guidance filters through.
Employer appraisals that have previously asked “did you complete your CPD hours?” will begin asking “can you demonstrate what changed in how you work as a result of your CPD?” Clients issuing prequalification questionnaires will begin including competence governance requirements that ask how the practice evaluates CPD effectiveness — not whether CPD was completed. Professional bodies conducting CPD audits will move toward the reflective evidence standard that ARB has already made mandatory from January 2025, requiring architects to map each logged activity to specific competence criteria and demonstrate applied reflection.
The practitioner who has been maintaining a structured record of CPD intent and outcomes — what they intended to do differently, and whether they followed through — will find these changes straightforward. The practitioner whose record is a spreadsheet of session titles and hours will find them considerably less so.
This is not a criticism of anyone who built their CPD record under the rules that existed. It is a description of a transition that is already underway, and of what practitioners on the right side of it will have that practitioners on the wrong side will not.
What a compliant CPD record actually looks like now
The guidance is deliberately not prescriptive on format. It does not mandate a specific platform or system. What it does specify — through the SKEB framework and the PDCA evaluation cycle — is the type of evidence that constitutes genuine competence development.
That evidence has three components.
Documented intent to change practice. After each CPD session, what did you intend to do differently? This needs to be recorded at the time — not reconstructed retrospectively during an audit. Intent captured immediately after attendance is meaningful; intent reconstructed months later is not.
Evidence that the intent was acted upon. Did the thing you intended to do differently actually happen? If it did, when and in what context? If it did not, why not — was it a project opportunity that hadn’t arisen, a change in circumstances, or a reconsideration of the approach? Both outcomes are legitimate. The absence of any follow-up record is not.
A connection between CPD activity and competence criteria. What competence area did this session address? How does it link to the requirements of your current role? A session on fire door specification attended by a fire safety consultant has an obvious link. Making that link explicit — rather than leaving it implicit — is what the guidance is asking for.
None of these components requires extraordinary effort from a practitioner who has been engaging with CPD seriously. The gap is not motivation. It is infrastructure. Most practitioners have no structured mechanism for capturing this evidence at the right moment — immediately after attendance, before the session has faded and the next project has demanded attention.
That infrastructure is what the guidance assumes exists. For most practitioners in AEC right now, it does not.
What this means in practice
The ITFG guidance does not create a new burden for professionals who have been taking CPD seriously. What it creates is a new language for what serious CPD looks like — and a new expectation that practitioners can demonstrate it.
That expectation will become progressively more visible over the next two years. The practitioners who will navigate it straightforwardly are not necessarily those who have attended the most sessions, or chosen the most prestigious providers, or accumulated the most hours. They are those who have a record that shows not just what they attended, but what changed.
That record has always been worth having. It is now, formally, what is being asked for.
ARB made this shift mandatory in January 2025 — requiring architects to demonstrate applied reflection against core competency areas, not simply log attendance. RIBA’s outcomes-based model preceded it. The ITFG guidance extends the underlying logic across every discipline and every organisation in the built environment sector. The direction of travel has been consistent. The May 2026 guidance is not a departure. It is a destination that has been in sight for years, now formally arrived.
References and source notes
Editorial note: The ITFG guidance (ITFG:01/26, Managing Competence in the Built Environment, May 2026) is the primary source for all section and clause references in this piece. All quotations attributed to the guidance — including Section 9.6, Section 9.6.2, and Section 9.14 — should be verified against the published document before publication. The ICC 15 Principles are cited as published in April 2026. The BS 8670-1:2024 reference should be confirmed against the BSI published standard. ARB mandatory reflective CPD requirement (January 2025) should be verified against the current ARB CPD Scheme guidance.
Primary sources:
- ITFG:01/26. (2026, May). Managing Competence in the Built Environment. Industry Task and Finish Group. [https://www.rics.org/content/dam/ricsglobal/documents/surveying/ITFG_Managing-Competence-Built-Environment_ICC-Principles_140526.pdf]
- ICC. (2026, April). 15 Principles for Competence Management in the Built Environment. Industry Competence Committee.
- BSI. (2024). BS 8670-1:2024 — Skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours (SKEB) framework for the built environment. British Standards Institution.
- Building Safety Act 2022. c.30. [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/30]
- Grenfell Tower Inquiry. (2024). Phase 2 Report. HC 1 (2024–25). [https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/]
- ARB. (2025). CPD Scheme Guidance. Architects Registration Board.
Supporting academic sources:
- Kirkpatrick, D.L. (1994). Evaluating training programs: The four levels. Berrett-Koehler. [Level 3/4 evaluation — what the ITFG guidance is now requiring at organisational level]
- Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. [Behavioural intent as a measurable precursor to practice change]
