In May 2026 the Industry Task and Finish Group published the most significant guidance on competence management in the built environment since Grenfell. More than fifty professional bodies, regulators, and industry organisations — including BSI, HSE, RIBA, CIBSE, and the Building Safety Regulator — converged on a single position: that evidencing competence in AEC organisations means demonstrating that training produces measurable changes in practice, not that it was attended.
For CPD providers, this is not a theoretical shift. The organisations that commission and attend your CPD are now subject to a governance framework that requires them to evaluate whether training “genuinely improves performance and behaviour, rather than simply recording completion” (ITFG:01/26, Section 9.6.2). That evaluation will be applied to your sessions, whether or not you have prepared for it.
The providers who can supply evidence that their sessions produce practice change will have a clear commercial advantage over those who cannot. This piece is about what that evidence looks like, and why most providers currently have none of it.
What the guidance is asking from the organisations that attend your CPD
The ITFG guidance organises competence management around a Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle. In the Check phase, organisations are required to evaluate whether their training arrangements are effective. Section 9.14 (Evaluation) requires periodic review of whether management policies and competence processes “are working as intended” — specifically including whether CPD and training activities genuinely improve performance.
Section 9.6 is explicit: CPD must be “purposeful, applied, and linked to measurable improvements in competence,” and organisations must “evaluate the effectiveness of development activities by observing how they enhance actual workplace performance and behaviour.”
The practical consequence reaches your sessions directly. AEC organisations operating under the guidance will begin asking their CPD providers a question they have not previously asked systematically: can you tell us whether attending your CPD produced any change in professional practice?
Providers who can answer this question with evidence — not testimonials, not satisfaction survey data, but structured behavioural evidence — are aligned with where the sector is moving. Providers who cannot are exposed, not to regulatory penalty directly, but to the much more immediate commercial consequence of being unable to answer a question their clients are now formally required to ask.
Why attendance data cannot answer that question
Attendance tells you that a professional was in the room. A satisfaction survey tells you whether they found it engaging. Neither tells you what changed.
The ITFG guidance’s SKEB framework — Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours — requires evidence across all four dimensions. A session title in a CPD log evidences none of them. A four-star rating on a feedback form evidences none of them.
The guidance does not mandate that providers produce this evidence themselves. But the organisations commissioning and attending CPD are now required to evaluate it. That evaluation will increasingly fall back on what providers can supply, because the commissioning organisation rarely has visibility into what happened in an attendee’s professional practice after the session ended — the provider’s relationship with attendees, at the point of the session, is the only place that data can be captured.
The providers positioned to supply it are the ones with access to structured data on what attendees intended to do differently — and whether they did. That data does not currently exist for most CPD sessions in the AEC sector. This is not a new problem. CPD Impact exists precisely because the sector has operated without outcome measurement infrastructure for decades. The ITFG guidance formalises what was already understood, informally, to be a gap.
What evidence of CPD effectiveness now looks like
The guidance is clear that outcome evidence must go beyond attendance and accreditation. The SKEB framework requires demonstrable competence development, and demonstrating it means a provider needs to understand three things about their sessions that almost none currently track systematically.
First: what proportion of attendees intend to do something differently as a result of attending. Second: which specific practice changes are most commonly triggered by the session. Third: what proportion of those intentions are acted upon at 30 and 90 days after attendance.
These are not complicated questions. They are, however, questions that require structured data collection at the attendee level — data that is currently absent from almost every CPD programme in the AEC sector, regardless of how well-regarded the provider or how technically rigorous the content.
Providers who have this data are in a fundamentally different commercial position. They can tell a commissioning organisation: here is what attendees of this session reported they would do differently, and here is the proportion who confirmed they followed through. That is the evidence base the ITFG guidance is calling for. It is also, not incidentally, the evidence base that makes a CPD provider’s commercial case for continued investment in their programme far more compelling than any attendance figure has ever been.
Two existing international standards reinforce why this is not a new obligation dressed up in new language. ISO 10015:1999, the quality management guideline for competence management and people development, has required organisations since 1999 to plan training against defined competence needs, deliver it, and evaluate whether it achieved the intended development — evaluation of training outcomes is specified directly at Section 4.4. ISO 21001:2018 requires educational organisations to demonstrate that their activities produce the learning outcomes they claim, with documented objectives and evaluation against them. Under a strict reading, a CPD provider delivering sessions to AEC professionals is an educational organisation with ISO 21001 obligations. Neither standard is new. Neither has been practically implementable for most providers, because the infrastructure to capture attendee-level outcome data has not existed. The ITFG guidance is the regulatory reinforcement that makes continuing to ignore both commercially untenable.
What this means for your programme
The ITFG guidance does not place new obligations directly on CPD providers. It places new obligations on the organisations that attend CPD — and those obligations will flow upward to providers through the procurement and commissioning relationships that fund CPD programmes.
The providers who will benefit are those who treat this as an opportunity rather than a compliance burden: an opportunity to demonstrate, with structured evidence, that their CPD actually works. A provider who can show a commissioning organisation real behavioural data — what attendees intended to change, what proportion followed through — is offering something no competitor relying on attendance numbers and feedback scores can match.
The providers who will struggle are those who continue to measure attendance and call it impact.
This is not a new problem. The gap between attendance and evidence has always existed in AEC CPD. The ITFG guidance means, for the first time, that the gap has a formal regulatory context — and that filling it is no longer optional for organisations that take their competence management obligations, and their commercial positioning, seriously.
FAQs
The ITFG guidance places obligations on AEC organisations that manage competence — not directly on CPD providers. However, those organisations are now required to evaluate whether training “genuinely improves performance and behaviour, rather than simply recording completion” (ITFG:01/26, Section 9.6.2). That evaluation will flow back to providers through procurement and commissioning relationships. Providers who can supply structured evidence of outcomes are aligned with where their clients are moving; those who cannot will increasingly struggle to answer a question their commissioning organisations are now formally required to ask.
The guidance’s SKEB framework requires competence evidence across Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours. Attendance records and accreditation status demonstrate none of these directly. The guidance’s PDCA evaluation cycle (Section 9.14) explicitly requires review of whether training activities “genuinely improve performance and behaviour.” For CPD providers, the evidence that satisfies this standard is structured data on what attendees intended to do differently after attending — and whether those intentions were acted upon at follow-up.
Providers should begin collecting structured behavioural data from attendees — specifically, what attendees intend to do differently as a result of attending, and, at 30 and 90 days, whether those intentions were acted upon. This data is the evidence base the guidance’s competence management framework is calling for, and it aligns with pre-existing obligations under ISO 10015 and ISO 21001 that most providers have never had the infrastructure to meet. It is also the evidence base that demonstrates commercial value to the commissioning organisations that fund CPD programmes.
