Professional Development Allowance
The Professional Development Allowance is an annual allocation of funds by AU to each CUPE 3911 member, available for allowable expenses related to your work at AU (memberships, registrations, supplies, other). The Allowance is detailed in the CUPE 3911 Collective Agreement, Article 27.04.
Collective Agreement, Article 27.04
The employer agrees to provide each employee access to a professional
development allowance of $300 per year, which may be accumulated for a
maximum of five years.* It may be claimed as per the University
Professional Development Guidelines Policy, upon production of receipts
for the purchase of books, equipment, professional journals. library fees,
professional fees, course registration fees or conference registration fees
and related expenses when these are related to the employee’s tutoring
duties and responsibilities.
*Note that the funds accumulate for 5 years, but if no claims are made during that time, then no further allocations are added to the member’s account. So be sure to claim your expenses!
To find out what YOUR balance is, you can look it up online.
From AU’s The Current, use the HR tab at the top, go to benefits, then choose CUPE, and scroll down to professional development. Under that choice, you should see the button for “view your balance.” That brings you into a set of forms. To fill out those forms, you may need refer to the more detailed instructions attached below.
Please see the attachment produced by AU for more details on filling out the forms to find your balance. Note, too, that previously, it has been called the Professional Development Allowance to differentiate it from the Professional Development Fund. However, as you will see on The Current, AU is no longer using the word “allowance” but are also calling it (a bit confusingly) the PD Fund.
Note also that the instructions you can link to below contain a little outdated information (like instructing your to enter through the MyAU Banner system instead of thru The Current). But it does walk you through how to fill the forms mentioned above.
See link Here for instructions on looking up the balance of your Professional Development Allowance account.
Members can make claims against their Allowance at any time of year by submitting a reimbursement claim form in Chrome River. If you have concerns about eligible expenses, you may want to reach out to your supervisor or course coordinator for approval before proceeding.
For general questions on the Professional Development Allowance, write to CUPE 3911 at administrator@cupe3911.ca