Professional Development Frequently Asked Questions

All registrants are expected to participate in, document and submit their Professional Development requirements to the College in a two-year-long “reporting cycle.”  Your submission deadline is based on your year of registration.

CRPO expects all registrants to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to professional growth and development so long as they practice the profession and they are registered with the College.

The Professional Development component of the QA Program provides a general framework that was designed to help registrants reflect on their practice, and consciously shape the course of their professional growth. The PD tools help registrants meet their self-reporting obligations. These tools also help CRPO meet its obligation to assure the public that registrants of the profession are working to maintain and enhance their competence.

With that in mind, registrants are encouraged to update their Professional Development tools regularly. The College expects all registrants to meet the minimum requirements for each tool every two years (based on their year of registration) and submit those tools to the College in advance of their submission deadline.

The singular exception to this obligation is for new registrants of the College: new registrants have special requirements that introduce them to the QA Program – these requirements are called the “new registrant requirements.”

Your New Registrant requirements are, by definition, a part of your Professional Development requirements! By fulfilling your New Registrant requirements, you are contributing to your Professional Development requirements.

Your New Registrants requirements due within 2 months of your date of registration UNLESS you registered with CRPO between November 1, 2020 and February 1, 2021, in which case, your deadline is April 1, 2021. Your first Professional Development reporting cycle begins on your date of registration and ends November 30, two years from your year of registration.

Example: if your date of registration was February 10, 2020, your New Registrant requirements would be April 10, 2020. Your Professional Development reporting cycle would therefore have begun February 10, 2020 and would end November 30, 2022.

All registrants are required to engage in at least 40 hours of professional development learning activities during their two-year Professional Development reporting cycle.

Registrants demonstrate this learning requirement by either documenting their activities and saving it in a personal portfolio.

The learning activities you document must:

• Have occurred during the relevant Professional Development reporting cycle (activities which occurred prior to the reporting cycle or are recorded in anticipation of future completion will not be counted towards your minimum requirements); and
• At least one of the activities you record during the reporting cycle must be didactic, and
• At least one of the activities you record during the reporting cycle must be experiential.

It is recommended that you record activities in your Learning Record soon after you complete them. Doing this means you will have a nearly complete Record by your deadline and avoids the panic of trying to fill in two years of information just before the deadline!

If you are engaged in an activity that unfolds over a significant span of time (for example a semester-long course), you are welcome to include that in your Learning Record before it has ended, but only record the hours you’ve completed already (not the hours you expect to complete). Since you can edit entries made in the Learning Record, update the hours associated with that activity as often as you need to.

Registrants are required to engage in at least 40 hours of learning activities over a period of two years (this is referred to as the reporting cycle). This requirement presumes that two years have passed between the date of initial registration and your November 30^th PD deadline. However, a small number of registrants will find that the time between their date of initial registration and their November 30^th deadline is shorter than two years. This subset of registrants is required to engage in “a reasonable proportion” of the 40 hours. The reasonable proportion will be calculated based on the total number of months the registrant has been registered (or the total number of months that have elapsed between one deadline and the next, if applicable). For example, a registrant who has been registered for 18 months (or ¾ of a two-year time span) would be required to engage in at least 30 hours of learning activities (which is ¾ of the 40-hour requirement).

Registrants of the College are asked to rely on their professional judgment to select, and then participate in, learning activities that are credible, related to the practice of psychotherapy, and that will meet their individual learning needs. At present, the College does not require that registrant engage in “pre-approved” activities, and so it is expected that registrants would rely on their own prudence and judgment to invest their time and financial resources in learning activities that meet their individual learning needs.

Examples of experiential activities:

• Peer consultation
• Clinical supervision
• Receiving personal psychotherapy

Examples of didactic activities:

• Attending education/training programs or courses
• Engaging in independent study/ self-guided learning
• Writing for a scholarly publication (e.g. journals, textbooks, and other educational resources)

Learning activities reported in the Learning Record must be:

• Relevant to the practice of psychotherapy.
• Credible and require some form of participation. Examples include: courses where a registrant must attend/participate in lectures, course readings, and evaluation; seminars or workshops, where a registrant  attends/participates in lectures, discussion groups or role playing; reading/study groups, where a registrant  must interact with learning materials and discuss the subject matter with others in the group; and so on. In the case of an independent study, participation may involve the reading of materials and engagement with other kinds of learning resources.
• Verifiable where some form of documentation exists that enables a registrant to demonstrate that they have completed the activity, and the College, if needed, to verify that the activity occurred. Ideally, this would be a letter or certificate of completion which identifies: the activity, the organization’s contact information, the date or period in which the activity occurred, the duration of the activity, and the name of the participant. Where a registrant engages in independent study, s/he should maintain careful records of learning resources that were used.

No. Registrants are expected to retain documentation (e.g. certificates of participation) that can verify your participation in learning activities in your own professional portfolio.

You are only required to provide documentary evidence of participation in the activities logged in your Learning Record if such evidence is requested by staff.

No.

Paid work does not qualify as a personal professional development activity. (In the same way that providing psychotherapy services to a client for a wage or fee is paid work, teaching programs, courses, workshops, seminars, conferences or webinars is NOT an activity undertaken for the express purpose of your professional growth and learning.)

If you refer to the tables of examples of learning activities on page 6 of the Professional Development guide, you will note that the “preparation for teaching programs, courses, workshops, seminars, conferences or webinars” does appear on the list of examples of professional development learning activities. You are welcome to include the preparatory time you spend researching and broadening your understanding of psychotherapy / psychotherapeutic practices and socio-cultural applicability/trends in your Learning Record.