Andrew, whilst on shift listening to a colleague, stressed, anxious and upset that they had sent their portfolio to the HCPC and had the portfolio returned, 7 times!  

On making a cup of tea with his colleague, Andrew asked, “what the HCPC had said” and “what he thought was wrong with his portfolio” (which, for visualisation, weighted the same as a small child!) 

“I do CPD all the time” they responded, “but I simply don’t record everything I do “. “There is no way for me to record it properly, I don’t know the right format it should be in, and I just don’t have the time, so I pop everything I do in a shoebox”.  

Andrew tuned in on the three key words – Formatting – Time – Shoebox and away his mind ran, with a perfectly formatted thesis for his degree.

CPD Made Easy!  

Andrew researched with a group of professionals, not just medics, but also financial advisors, a chartered surveyor and other professionals working across a wide spectrum of professions. 

Ironically, everyone related to these same three key elements  picked up from his own colleagues and all reported that they either use paper and pens or an old and antique online system that often loses their CPD entry. 

From there, Andrew gave birth to the project CPDme (in a non-biblical sense). 

Andrew formed a team with his University and, from there, created a research system that supported these professionals but, more importantly, reduced the time people needed to think about recording CPD, reduced the barrier of “I don’t know the format” and the final element that was creating a digital shoebox that could be used to organise, sort, and highlight gaps in their CPD. Afterall, shoeboxes get dusty and scattered if they never get sorted out.  

On November the 9th at 11am in the morning, the research group started sharing the link to Andrews' new system (CPDme) outside the control group, and it organically went viral, before viral was even a thing using MSN Messenger (Old School).

Since 2009, Andrew and the Team at CPDme have supported over 100,000+ users with over 3million submissions to our system and, more importantly, allowed professionals and students across a wide range of professional backgrounds to use CPDme to support them in their professional practice. 

As a not-for-profit social venture, Andrew supported every student across the world should have access to use CPDme to support them to understand the importance of recording and managing CPD in the hope that, after graduating, they will stand out to their potential employer and also advocate in the future, that maintaining an accurate record of their CPD is part of their professional practice, supporting accountability and defendability and more importantly adopt the ethos “Development for Life”.