A Friendly Reminder to Filipino Professionals

Have you checked the expiration date of your license? Our hard earned Professional Regulations Commission (PRC) ID expires every 3 years as mandated by our law to regulate the practice of our profession. We are easily reminded because validity expires on our birth date itself. So check your wallets and take a glance at your precious PRC identification card.

Whether nearly to expire or will still take years, just in case you missed the news or important announcements, I think you better click on the link below. By the way, when was the last time you visited the PRC website? Well guilty as charged I only visit it during renewal period.  If you could have noticed it is scattered all over the web page. There is an additional requirement for Filipino Professionals before we can get the New ID? Drum roll please, this is the CPD credit units.

http://www.prc.gov.ph/

screen shot from PRC official website

CPD or the Continuing Professional Development, in my understanding, is the government’s way to encourage professionals to seek further development in their careers. It is significant in the evolving changes happening around us, technology is the best example. Not only the Philippines, but also our neighboring countries need CPD in the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) community wherein foreign nationalities will have the privilege to practice  their professions in different  places in our region like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and others.

While I am browsing the webpage and looking for more information about the CPD, I saw the revise guidelines wherein there are two sets of downloadable PDFs. One is 2013 and the other is 2016. I suppose these are two significant years in the implementation of this law. Annex A of the 2016 Guidelines, assuming that this table superseded Annex E of 2013, states the number of credit units per profession.

http://www.prc.gov.ph/uploaded/documents/mRES_CPD_RevisedGuidelines_2016-990.pdf

Referring to the table above, a professional Accountant is required to earn 120 credit units, an Aeronautics Engineer need to earn 45 credit units in 3 years and so on. That is if your license will expire on January 2019 onward, but if earlier, there is a pro rate equivalent for 2018 and 2017 which you can refer below.

http://www.prc.gov.ph/

screen shot from PRC official website

CPD is challenging in the part of the government and our countrymen, but that is where we are heading – globalization. I assume other countries experienced difficulty as well when they started implementing new laws like any other statutes they wanted to implement.  There are issues that still need to clarify which other professions took already to the streets. There are grey areas that need to be assessed patched up to avoid any rooms for dispute and corruption. We are a democratic country, we voice out to concerned department and organizations that can help us shed light in this issue. Ending this article is a question in mind…  Are we ready for CPD? If not now, then when? Hope we can all cope with the challenge.

Feel free to send in your comments for the enhancement of this article.

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