How to use DOSSIAR for CPD hours
A practical guide to stacking structured and unstructured CPD with DOSSIAR scenarios — and getting the certificate CICC accepts on the first submission.
CICC's CPD framework asks for 16 structured hours and 8 unstructured hours per compliance year, with 4 of those dedicated to ethics. Every December, we watch RCICs scramble. They pay for webinars they half-listen to. They flip through recorded panels. They submit a stack of certificates and hope the CICC reviewer is feeling generous.
DOSSIAR was designed to make this a non-event. Every scenario you run maps to a CICC category — and the mapping is published so your compliance officer can audit it. Here's how to stack hours deliberately instead of accidentally.
The math
Scenarios range from 0.25 to 1.5 structured hours depending on difficulty and forum. An L2 Study Permit runs about 40 minutes and counts as 0.5 hours. An L4 RAD appeal runs 90 minutes and counts as 1.5. If you do one L3 a week — which many cohort-1 RCICs do during lunch — you stack 52 × 0.75 = 39 structured hours, which is more than double the annual requirement.
Ethics, specifically
Four hours of ethics CPD trips up more people than any other category. DOSSIAR ships a dedicated ethics module covering misrepresentation (s.40), scope-of-practice under CICC's ethics rules, conflict disclosure, and trust-fund handling. The module is structured as scenario-based, not lecture-based — so you do the work instead of reading about it.
Quarterly certificate workflow
At the end of every quarter, DOSSIAR auto-generates a CICC-formatted PDF that lists every scenario you completed, the category, the hours, and a cryptographic hash of the transcript so CICC can verify nothing was synthesized. Upload directly via the CPD tracker. We've never had a cohort-1 submission questioned on format — but CICC acceptance is always at their discretion.
The trap to avoid
Don't "farm" hours by running the easiest L1s repeatedly. Our dashboard flags imbalanced diets. The point is skill transfer, not credit-counting. If you're only doing Study Permit L1s in November, you're avoiding the drill, and your Weakest Category heatmap will show it to your firm admin.
What cohort #1 does
The median cohort-1 RCIC logs ~4 hours/month, mostly L2–L3, with a bias toward their weakest category as surfaced by the dashboard. By October they're already compliant and spend November and December on the Jaw-Drop features (Opposing Counsel, Multiverse, Refusal of the Week). This is the rhythm DOSSIAR is designed for.
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