What is Ongoing Competence?

Ongoing Competency is the process by which professionals maintain and develop their skills, knowledge, and competence further in order to practice safely and effectively.

The CLC expects licence holders to keep their professional knowledge up to date through Ongoing Competency Activities. Activities should include training/mentoring/coaching  and all of this must be relevant and useful to your role.

We expect to be able to see a record of your Ongoing Competency that is up to date at any time we may request this information. It is important that you achieve your Ongoing Competency requirement which is outlined below and maintain a good record of it.

PLEASE NOTE: It is a CLC Lawyers own personal and professional responsibility to record and maintain a personal copy of their own ongoing competency record which is accessible at all times should the CLC request a copy.

Ongoing Competency Requirement

How to plan your Ongoing Competency Activities

We are encouraging licence holders to think about how the various learning activities they have done could count towards their Ongoing Competency hours.

Many licence holders will have already obtained Ongoing Competency hours by attending formal training events, seminars or paid-for webinars and online-training. There are lots of different ways that Ongoing Competency hours can be counted. We are encouraging individuals and their employers to think about events in their day-to-day work that can contribute to Ongoing Competency hours, such as, in-house training sessions, providing or received mentoring and coaching. Record any information sessions or workshops that your employer has hosted on a specific legal-related topic, such as AML.

Just remember, it’s important to keep a record of these types of Ongoing Competency events, including the date, the duration and of course, the topic and how it contributed to your professional knowledge and skills.

You may want to be talking to your employers now to ask them to make sure they are helping you reflect on any past learning events that can be recorded towards your annual Ongoing Competency hours. If they have a log of in-house events that have been delivered, be that topic-briefings, policy updates or in-house training on compliance issues, these can all be used to evidence your CPD.

While the CLC does expect you to fulfil your Ongoing Competency requirements, we do not expect you to be having to do this just through commercially provided training.

Ongoing Competency Record

1 November 2024 - 31 October 2025