Every AEC professional indemnity policy written in the UK today is priced on assumptions about competence governance that cannot be verified at underwriting. Practices declare their staff are qualified. They submit professional body membership lists. They confirm CPD requirements are met. What none of this answers — and what the post-Grenfell regulatory framework now makes…

The commercial case for manufacturer CPD rests on one assumption: that a session, once delivered, moves toward a specification. Almost every manufacturer measures the only part of that chain that’s easy to count — attendance — and treats it as a proxy for the part that actually matters commercially. The two are not the same…

In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus ran a memory experiment on himself, learning strings of nonsense syllables and testing how much he could recall over time. The finding attached to his name is now one of the most cited results in the psychology of learning: without reinforcement, most new information decays fast. The specific figure often quoted…

The most sophisticated CPD tracking tools available in 2026 are genuinely impressive pieces of software. AI-assisted evidence import pulls certificates and attendance records automatically. Zero-spreadsheet interfaces replace the annual scramble to reconstruct a year of CPD activity from email confirmations. Real-time compliance dashboards show, at a glance, exactly how many hours a professional has logged…

RIBA CPD Provider Network. CIBSE Approved CPD. IStructE Approved CPD. These logos appear on thousands of CPD invitations every year, sitting quietly in the corner of the email or the event page, doing a job that most professionals never examine closely. Here is what the badge actually contains as information: the provider has submitted a…

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…

In 1885, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus ran an experiment on himself. He memorised lists of nonsense syllables and recorded how quickly he forgot them. What he found — replicated across hundreds of subsequent studies — is that unreinforced information decays steeply in the hours after exposure. Most of it is gone within a…

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry examined, in exhaustive forensic detail, how specification and product knowledge failures propagated through AEC projects. Its Phase 2 Report, published in 2024, found repeatedly that the question was not only whether individual professionals knew enough. It was whether organisations had systems in place to ensure that competent people were making competent…

The first objection anyone raises to measuring behavioural intent is this: intention is not the same as behaviour. Someone can say they intend to change a specification decision after attending a CPD session and then not change it. So what exactly is being measured? It is a fair objection. It deserves a direct answer before…

Why CPD measurement in AEC is broken — and what it would take to fix it In 1934, T.S. Eliot asked three questions that nobody in his audience could answer: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost…