Continuing professional development guidance

Requirements

Auditors are required to:

Accumulate your CPD over each three year period of registration as a greenhouse and energy auditor. The cycle of three-year registration periods starts on the date you were first registered.
Provide us with details of your CPD in your annual reports. See Reporting and providing evidence below for more information.
If your auditing work is focused on a particular industry or industries then your CPD should reflect this. For example, if you are active in conducting Emissions Reduction Fund audits in the landfill methodology, then your CPD should in part be focused on developing your technical knowledge of the landfill sector.
For Category 1 auditors, we expect your CPD to focus on developing your abilities in technical areas relevant to schemes we administer.
For Category 2 auditors, we expect your CPD to focus on maintaining your skills and expertise in relation to audit and assurance. You should also continue developing your abilities in technical areas relevant to schemes we administer.

What is continuing professional development?

CPD is an accepted activity that helps you expand your knowledge, maintain or update your technical skills and helps you to progress your auditing career.

An activity that does not directly improve your professional knowledge cannot be counted as CPD. For example, business as usual activities including daily tasks, paid consultancy work or standard administration duties is not acceptable CPD.

Reporting and providing evidence

As a registered greenhouse and energy auditor, you must submit an annual report to the Clean Energy Regulator on each anniversary of your registration.

This report includes a record of the CPD you have completed during the previous 12 months, including:

a description of each CPD activity
date(s) the CPD activity was undertaken
the organisation that presented the CPD activity, and
the number of CPD hours you are claiming.

There is no minimum number of hours that you must provide in each year’s annual report, it is 15 days or 112 hours across your three-year registration period.

We can suspend your registration or deregister you as an auditor if you do not demonstrate that you have completed sufficient CPD.

Selection of auditors asked for additional evidence

Each year we randomly select a sample of auditors to provide additional evidence to support CPD claims that they make. This evidence can include:

agendas
assessment reports
attendance lists
certificates
detailed diary notes
employer records
enrolment records
receipts
statutory declarations
syllabuses, or
transcripts

Routine requests for additional evidence

We can ask you to provide additional evidence for other circumstances. For example, if you have claimed technical reading as CPD, we may ask you to explain how your reading contributed to your professional development.

Evidence provided to other professional bodies

If you have submitted evidence to another professional body to satisfy their CPD requirements, then you may provide that evidence to the Clean Energy Regulator—provided the evidence is for CPD that is relevant to the schemes we administer.