Earning CITMA Paralegal CPD
Your guide to CPD for CITMA Paralegals and tips on how to complete your eight hours’ CPD this year.
What CPD can do for you
We are committed to helping you to maintain and grow your skills and knowledge base so you can continue to be successful in your career.
By collecting and recording the development activities you undertake, you demonstrate to employers, present and future, that you are dedicated to improving your skillset.
Introduced in 2019, the continuing professional development (CPD) scheme helps develop trade mark paralegals, administrators and formalities staff working within our profession. We aim for it to continue raising and maintaining the standards within this essential part of our profession.
We recommend you take a look at the CITMA Paralegal Competency Framework to track your progression as a CITMA Paralegal.
The framework includes technical skills, related to understanding of legislation and management of trade marks and designs, and general skills such as communication, conduct and ethics, self-awareness and development.
Earning CPD
The requirement to maintain your CITMA Paralegal membership is to complete eight hours’ CPD each year.
One of most effective ways to earn CPD is by attending our events. We run a full programme of events, including ones designed specifically for you.
We are excited to bring you a CITMA Paralegal Conference this year – offering you a full day dedicated to your learning and development. It will take place in the autumn and details will be announced soon.
Getting a well-rounded development journey is not just about attending events. You can earn CPD and demonstrate your development in lots of different ways.
Here are some of the ways you can earn CPD – please refer to the guidelines for a full list:
- Attend a CPD event
- Speak at a CPD event
- Participate in an “in-house” educational meeting or discussion
- Prepare a lecture, seminar, article or law report
- Undertake personal study of relevant books, articles, law reports, conference papers or recordings (up to 50% of the CPD requirement can be completed this way)
Listed against all our events is the number of CPD hours you can earn for attending, helping you to measure your progress.
We’ve also written some guidance on how to earn CPD while working from home.
Recording your CPD
There is no formal requirement for you to log all your CPD activities. However, we do encourage you to keep a log of relevant information relating to your CPD so that when it is time to submit that you can demonstrate a commitment to your personal development.
To help you, please download the spreadsheet we have created for you.
As the scheme is self-certificated, it is up to you to determine if you believe an activity qualifies for CPD based on what you have learnt during the activity you have undertaken.
Reporting your CPD
In November we will be contacting you to submit your CPD through our website which will only take a few minutes to complete.
We won’t ask everyone to provide evidence, but we will be contacting a random selection of participants to provide further details of their CPD activity as part of our compliance monitoring.
If you have any questions at any point, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Not part of the scheme?
If you joined CITMA before the scheme started, and are not part of it but would like to be, please contact us, and we will be able to enrol you onto the scheme.