Right, let’s get into the weeds on something profoundly necessary but universally despised: Continuing Professional Development. If you’re a professional in the UK—an architect, an engineer, a solicitor—you’re constantly being told to ‘do your CPD.’ It sounds like the equivalent of eating your vegetables: boring, inevitable, but supposedly good for you. But what if I told you that the whole distinction between formal and informal CPD is largely a semantic convenience, a behavioural trick, and that the stuff you think matters probably matters less than the stuff you don’t even log?
This isn’t about ticking boxes. This is about professional evolution. If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. There is no neutral. So, we’re going to hit the reset button, look at the two types of CPD through a strategic, slightly mischievous lens, and figure out where the real power lies. Forget the dusty, academic definitions. We’re talking about cognitive impact and commercial gravitational pull.
The Paradox of the Certificate: Formal CPD as a High-Friction Signal
Formal CPD—the workshops, the accredited seminars, the bits you get a shiny certificate for. It’s structured, measurable, and often mandatory. Therefore, it has a high-trust signal. When a manufacturer gets their session approved by, say, the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), they’re not just providing knowledge; they are buying credibility. They are reducing the ‘perception gap’ for you, the professional. You don’t have to spend your own time vetting the content; the professional body has done it for you. It’s an act of cognitive kindness, which is why people are willing to sit through it.
But here is the behavioural catch: Formal CPD often suffers from the ‘Attendance Fallacy.’
We confuse the act of attending with the act of learning. You’ve been there: sitting in a dim room, mainlining lukewarm coffee, nodding politely as the presenter rifles through 80 slides. You leave with a certificate that proves you were present, not that you were changed. The structure is great for compliance, but the rigid format can be the enemy of genuine absorption.
Truth No. 1: Formal is High Signal, Low Retention
Formal CPD is excellent for Compliance and Signalling, but poor for Retention and Context-Specificity.
It gives you the ‘what’ in a clean, verifiable package. You learn about the new British Standard, BS 8573. But when you’re on-site and need to apply that standard to a uniquely irritating junction detail, that’s where the formal knowledge dissolves and the real, messy learning begins. Formal learning provides the vocabulary; informal learning teaches you how to speak the language in a bar fight.
The Hidden Gold Mine: Informal CPD as Behavioural Leverage
Now, let’s talk about the messy 80%. Informal CPD. This is the stuff that happens when you’re elbow-deep in a problem. It’s the two hours spent diving into the manufacturer’s technical data sheets because the specified product just won’t fit. It’s the hour spent mentoring a junior, which forces you to articulate a decade of tacit knowledge. It’s reading The Economist or a profound book that reframes how you think about risk.
It’s completely self-directed. It has almost no structure. And it’s exponentially more valuable for immediate competence. Why? Because of ‘Asymmetric Payoff’.
When you engage in informal learning, the learning is directly correlated to an immediate, painful problem. The friction of the problem is the primary driver of retention. If you spend three hours researching the fire-stopping requirements for a complex curtain wall system because your project manager is breathing down your neck, you will never forget that information. The anxiety is the glue.
Truth No. 2: Pain Drives Permanent Knowledge
Informal CPD exploits the ‘Pain-to-Knowledge’ pathway, making the learning stickier and instantly applicable, but it is invisible to regulators.
Regulators, however, are starting to catch up. Many UK professional bodies are shifting towards reflective practice—logging the informal learning. This is a game-changer because it moves the focus from what you did to what you learned and how you’ll use it. Your two hours of panicked technical research can now be formally logged as CPD, provided you articulate the outcome and the application.
Strategic Reframe: Who Benefits From Which Type?
We need to look at CPD through the lens of incentives. Who is the primary beneficiary of each?
| CPD Type | Primary Beneficiary | Core Function/Incentive | Behavioural Trick |
| Formal | Professional Body / Manufacturer / Employer | Signal: Proves compliance, certifies quality. | High-Trust Anchor: Reduces the cognitive load of vetting quality. |
| Informal | The Individual Professional | Competence: Solves immediate, in-context problems. | Pain-Driven Retention: The urgency of the problem makes the learning permanent. |
Truth No. 3: Formal Sets Entry, Informal is Daily Tool
Manufacturers should focus on making their formal CPD a brilliant, low-friction entry point, and their informal resources the indispensable, context-rich daily tool.
Your CPD session should be a brilliant trailer for your website’s deep technical library. Don’t try to teach everything in the one-hour session; teach the frameworks and the context shifts. Then, make the informal learning—the data sheets, the CAD files, the case studies—so simple and clear that professionals default to your information when they have an urgent, informal learning need.
The Tyranny of the Metric: Data and the CPD Illusion
We need data to back this up. Except, the data is inherently flawed. Academic sources, and even UK Government studies on workplace skills, consistently report high satisfaction rates for structured training (Formal CPD). Why? Because it’s a finite event. It has a start, a middle, and a certified end. It feels complete.
But look closer at the impact data. Surveys tracking long-term behavioural change often struggle to link a single formal CPD event to a sustained change in practice months later. Conversely, the learning gained from an intensive, informal project troubleshooting session permanently alters the professional’s choice architecture on future projects.
Truth No. 4: Compliance Data Distorts Actual Competence
Satisfaction data favours Formal CPD because it’s a simple, high-contrast event. Competence data favours Informal CPD because it’s integrated into the ‘messy reality’ of work.
Think of it like this: Formal learning is a clean, scientific experiment under laboratory conditions. Informal learning is a tactical success achieved in a sandstorm. Which result is more relevant to your daily life? The one achieved in the sandstorm, every single time.
The Future Alignment: The Blurring of Boundaries
The most forward-thinking UK professional bodies are no longer measuring hours but impact. This shift is the profound alignment we need. If you’re required to reflect on your learning and demonstrate how it improved your practice, it suddenly doesn’t matter if the information came from a £500 accredited course (Formal) or a late-night session reading technical papers on a government website (Informal). The output—the enhanced professional competence—is the only currency that matters.
Truth No. 5: Formal is Ignition, Informal is the Engine
The most effective CPD strategy treats the formal as the ‘ignition’ and the informal as the ‘engine’.
Use the formal session to kickstart a deep dive into a new subject—like Passivhaus standards, or the complexities of large-scale timber construction. Then, use your daily project work as the fuel for your informal learning engine, driving the knowledge deeper through practical application and critical reflection.
Knowledge is a Martial Art
Look, learning isn’t a passive act. You don’t get good at Jiu-Jitsu by watching YouTube videos. You get good by showing up, getting choked, and spending hours in the messy, high-friction environment of the mat.
Formal CPD is the YouTube video: Clean, structured, and fundamentally low-stakes. Informal CPD is the mat: High-friction, high-stakes, and completely essential for true proficiency. Professionals who only rely on the low-friction formal stuff are setting themselves up for a rude awakening when the real-world pressure test comes.
Truth No. 6: Stakes, Not Content, Dictate Retention
The difference is not content quality; it’s stakes. Informal learning has higher stakes, which is why it forces the brain to encode the information with more permanence.
This is a cognitive load issue. Your brain is brilliant but lazy. It resists effort. Formal learning is often designed to be relatively low-effort; you just need to turn up. Informal learning is inherently high-effort—you are searching, synthesising, and applying under pressure. The higher the effort, the greater the reward in terms of neural encoding.
Simplicity Without Simplification
So, how do we use this?
For professionals: Stop seeing CPD as a chore. See formal CPD as an essential, pre-vetted injection of core knowledge (the mandatory stuff). But see informal CPD as the true arena of growth. Log your deep dives. Log your troubleshooting. Make the invisible, visible.
For firms and manufacturers: Understand that your battle is against cognitive unkindness. Make your formal CPD sessions brilliant, strategically concise, and accreditation-heavy (high trust signal). But then, make your technical website—your informal learning resource—a masterpiece of clarity, low friction, and immediate utility. If your website is hard to use, you are actively frustrating your customers’ informal CPD.
The great architects, engineers, and strategists are not the ones with the most certificates. They are the ones who have mastered the art of learning under pressure, who know how to turn a catastrophic project problem into a permanent, internal upgrade. They are the masters of the informal.
Truth No. 7: Truth Growth is Built in Informal Trenches
The ultimate goal of CPD is not a full logbook, but a robust professional identity, and that identity is built not in the classroom, but in the trenches of the informal application.
It’s time to stop just collecting certificates and start mastering the application. The growth is in the friction. Go find a problem that needs solving, because that, my friend, is the best CPD you’ll ever do. It’s the difference between hearing about the fight and actually winning it.