What counts as CPD?
Short answer
Any deliberate learning activity that develops professional competence can count as CPD: accredited courses, conferences, webinars, workshops, e-learning, structured reading, mentoring, shadowing, writing or presenting, and reflective practice. What matters is that the activity has a learning purpose and that you can evidence both the time spent and the outcome.
Activities that reliably count include accredited training courses, professional conferences and seminars, formal e-learning with completion tracking, in-house training with defined objectives, supervised practice, and preparing material you deliver to others.
Activities that count only with care: general reading with no record of what you took from it, informal conversations, attending an event without staying for the educational content, and routine work itself. Doing the job is not CPD; deliberately extending what you can do in the job is.
The safest rule is that an activity counts when you can state the objective, the time, and the change in practice. If two of those three are missing, most auditors will discount it.