How to complete a CPD self-assessment and set goals that mean something
How to complete a CPD self-assessment and set goals that actually mean something
You sit down to write your learning plan in December. You write a goal. Stare at it. Delete it. Write something generic. The page still looks mostly blank, and you're not even sure what you're supposed to be assessing yourself against.
You're not alone. This is the most common failure point in CPD for registered psychologists in Australia — not the hours, but the goal-setting moment that's supposed to anchor those hours to something meaningful.
This guide walks through how to do a genuine self-assessment, which resources the Board actually wants you to use, how to write goals specific enough to be useful, and how to stop them from being forgotten by February.
Why the self-assessment comes first
The Psychology Board of Australia's CPD model is built around a learning plan — a document that records what needs you identified, what goals you set, and how you planned to meet them. The self-assessment is the step that makes that learning plan meaningful rather than a box-ticking exercise.
Without it, you end up choosing CPD activities based on what's convenient or interesting rather than what your practice actually needs. That's not a violation — plenty of activities will be relevant regardless — but it means your CPD isn't working as hard as it could for your development.
With a genuine self-assessment, your learning plan explains why the activities you chose were the right ones. If you're ever audited, that contextual thread between identified need → goal → activity → reflection is exactly what a strong portfolio looks like.
The Board's CPD guidelines require psychologists to develop a learning plan at the start of each CPD year. One recommended approach for identifying your learning goals is to self-assess your professional knowledge, skills, and attributes against the Board's professional competencies.
Three resources that actually help
There are three resources the Board's guidelines specifically identify as useful starting points. All three are worth spending time with before you write a single goal.
1. Your job description
Start here. Review what your current role actually requires and ask yourself where there is scope to refresh, extend, or improve your skills and knowledge. The Board's CPD guidelines are explicit about this: your position description is the most useful anchor for identifying learning needs, because your CPD is most valuable when it's predominantly relevant to your current practice.
If you don't have a formal job description — common in private practice — sketch out the core responsibilities and client presentations that make up the majority of your work. That sketch is your starting point.
2. The Board's professional competencies and self-assessment tool
The Psychology Board's eight professional competencies describe what every registered psychologist must meet. Since 1 December 2025, updated competencies have placed greater emphasis on reflective practice and self-care (Competency 3), working equitably with diverse groups (Competency 7), and cultural safety with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Competency 8).
Critically, the Board has published a dedicated self-assessment tool to help you map these competencies to your scope of practice and identify where you're meeting, exceeding, or need to develop. It asks you to consider each competency in the context of your actual work — not as abstract standards, but as applied requirements. This is worth doing at the start of the CPD year, especially given the 2025 updates.
The self-assessment tool is available on the Psychology Board's website. Both the competency framework and the self-assessment tool are linked within Ponder when you're setting up your learning goals.
3. The national psychology exam curriculum
Less commonly used, but worth revisiting. The Board's national psychology exam curriculum outlines four domains of knowledge and skill required for general registration: psychological assessment and measurement, psychological intervention and therapies, research methodology, and professional, ethical and legal matters. Even experienced practitioners find it useful for identifying areas that haven't been actively revisited since training — particularly research methodology, psychometric tools, or changes to the legal and ethical frameworks governing practice.
There's no rule that says you have to use all three. Most psychologists start with their job description, check their responses against the competency framework, and use the exam curriculum as a secondary prompt for anything they might have missed. That order works well.
Questions to ask yourself
The Board's self-assessment tool includes structured reflection prompts. In plain English, these are the questions worth sitting with before you write your goals.
About your current practice
- Where do I feel least confident in my day-to-day practice?
- Which client presentations, contexts, or situations stretch me the most?
- What feedback have I received from peers or supervisors in the past year?
- Is there anything I've been avoiding because I feel under-prepared?
- Have there been situations where I've referred out, but would have preferred to manage differently with more training?
About the professional competencies
- Have I formally trained across all eight competencies, or are there areas I've never revisited since qualifying?
- How am I tracking against the three areas with updated emphasis since December 2025 — reflective practice and self-care, working with diverse groups, and First Nations cultural safety?
- Are there competencies where I perform confidently but haven't updated my knowledge in several years?
About where you're heading
- Am I planning to work with new client groups, take on different responsibilities, or move into a new practice area this year?
- Is there an area of genuine professional curiosity I'd like to explore?
- What are my medium-term career goals, and does my CPD reflect them?
If you're finding it hard to identify genuine gaps, ask your peer consultation partner. Peers and supervisors often notice things in your practice before you do — including areas of consistent strength that are ripe for extension, and recurring challenges worth addressing.
Three types of goals worth setting
Once you've done the self-assessment, you'll have a clearer sense of where your learning for the year should focus. The Board's self-assessment tool identifies three useful orientations for learning goals.
Learning in areas outside your current scope. Useful if you're planning to work with a new client group, take on new responsibilities, or apply for an area of practice endorsement.
Returning to areas where you were once competent but no longer have recency. Assessment tools, therapeutic modalities, or legal and ethical frameworks that have been updated since you last engaged with them.
Exploration in areas of genuine professional interest, even if they're not central to your current role. The Board allows this — intellectual engagement is a legitimate basis for CPD.
You don't need one of each. You need goals that honestly reflect where your practice needs to go this year. Some years will call for a lot of extending. Others, for careful refreshing of foundational skills. Both are valid.
The Board requires a minimum of one learning goal per year. Most psychologists find two or three more useful — enough to cover different aspects of practice without becoming unmanageable.
Writing goals that actually work
This is where most learning plans fall down. A goal that reads "improve my knowledge of trauma" is not a goal — it's a direction. You can't measure it, and you can't tell at year's end whether you achieved it.
The SMART framework is a useful test. Not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a way to check whether what you've written is actually a goal.
Compare these two goals side by side:
"Improve my knowledge of trauma-informed practice."
"Complete two CPD activities on trauma-informed practice with adolescents by 30 June. Apply learning to my formulation approach and discuss with peer consultation partner by August. Measure: observable change in how I introduce trauma screening in initial sessions."
The second version tells you exactly what you'll do, by when, how you'll apply it, and how you'll know whether it worked. That's what a useful goal looks like.
Ponder's goal-setting fields are built around these elements — prompting you for a focus area, the goal itself (with starter phrases if you're stuck), a measure of success, a timeframe, and a plan for how you'll get there. The intent is to help you write a genuinely useful goal in under five minutes, linked to the competency or practice area you identified in your self-assessment.
Your goals. Set once. Tracked all year.
Use this blog to work through your self-assessment. Once you know what you need to focus on, set your learning goals in Ponder — where they stay visible on your dashboard all year, not buried in a document you open once a year.
Try Ponder free →Making your goals stick all year
The most common failure mode is goals written in December, forgotten by February, and scrambled for in November. A collection of CPD certificates with no clear connection to a learning goal is a weak audit portfolio — and it usually means you've spent the year doing convenient CPD rather than useful CPD.
A few things help prevent this.
Keep your goals visible
Goals work best when you see them regularly. In Ponder, your learning goals are displayed on your home screen every time you log in — not buried in a settings menu or document you open once a year. That visibility is intentional. A goal you see regularly is one you're more likely to act on.
Link activities to goals as you go
When you log a CPD activity in Ponder, you can link it directly to the goal it's working toward. This does two things: it keeps the connection between activity and learning explicit, and it means you always know which goals have evidence behind them and which still need attention. You don't have to reconstruct that at audit time from a pile of certificates.
Review mid-year — and revise if needed
The Board's guidelines explicitly describe the learning plan as a dynamic document. If your role changes, a new learning opportunity arises, or you complete a goal earlier than expected, you can update your plan. You're not locked into December's goals until November.
A mid-year review — even informal, even just five minutes with your peer consultation partner — can surface whether you're on track and whether any goals need updating. In Ponder, you can mark goals off, link new activities, and add new goals at any point during the year at the click of a button.
Let your peer consultation inform your next goals
Peer consultation and goal-setting aren't separate parts of your CPD — they're connected. The insights from a good peer consultation session often reveal where the next year's goals should focus. One of the most useful questions to bring to your peer consultation is: "Looking at my practice over the past year, where do you think I'd benefit from further development?"
The learning plan should be treated as a living document — reviewed and adjusted as your practice changes throughout the year. CPD activities completed in pursuit of a goal you later revised or extended still count, provided the activity was relevant to your psychology practice at the time.
The learning plan exists for a reason. Done well, it's not an administrative obligation — it's a record of how you've deliberately shaped your professional development across a year. And if you're audited, it's the thing that makes the rest of your portfolio make sense. Click here to try Ponder free.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute regulatory or legal advice. CPD requirements and professional competencies may be subject to change. Always refer to the Psychology Board of Australia's CPD guidelines and the professional competencies for psychologists for current requirements.