CPD Declaration Dashboard

I know my CPD has been depressingly low in years and since I've moved into a new role in a new industry, I have a refreshed approach to it. I've had to learn new things quickly and whilst I haven't logged everything I have "done", I have made a better attempt at it.

Putting seminars/webinars/training on my calendar makes it easy to go back and retrospectively add it in.

Reading E+T magazine counts - it has a QR code in the contents page which takes you to a pre-populated page to add in your dates and hours.

A lot of the advice given here all makes a lot of sense and I do sympathise with you in that if I was logging everything I do that is new, I'd be never off the CPD page!

I tend to find it very difficult to capture on the job training, but as you correctly say, it would probably add up to many hours. Even on a long term project, there is often something new to look at, or a potential process improvement to make (because processes always need refinement).

But it is remembering to capture those hours which is often the challenge. And often I get stuck on the "well, I'm only doing my day job" aspect.

Allan Rowan said:

because I want to

I was thinking after I'd written all the above that this has always been my real motivation for CPD - and indeed for being an engineer - i's just because I'm interested in stuff. So I've never found it a problem justifying CPD time, my frustration (and occasionally in my career my employer's / manager's frustration with me) tends to be the pesky day job getting in the way of wanting to explore the interesting new thing I've just found out!

The engineers that could struggle are those that see their career as a straight nine to five way of earning enough to retire (which is absolutely fair enough), an occupation rather than a vocation, and I think it's for anyone with that mindset that it's really focussed on - just knowing what you were taught when you were 20 is not going to be good enough when you're 60, or even when you're 25.

Thanks Sergio, good idea also. I wasn't sure how everyone else approached their CPDs and hadn't really thought about podcasts.

Thanks Lisa   I'm going to look into this!

It's something I have to do better and that's take time to stop and reflect (which I don't do often enough). Between supporting various Clients/ projects and a foster carer when I'm not in the office, I've not stopped to take stock. I've been looking at CPD's all wrong, almost in a single dimension (training, seminars etc.) - the points you've made in your response are characteristics which I normally exhibit (i.e., mentoring, volunteering, exposure to new technology etc.); 1 - because I want to and, 2 - because it is also anticipated of me (normal behaviour for an experienced engineer).

Some of the content on IET.tv also goes towards your CPD hours https://tv.theiet.org/?home if you select the All Categories drop down and then CPD you can find all the videos that have CPD attached to them.

Thanks Mark, hadn't really given much thought with reference to volunteering counting towards the CPD hours. 

Another one which I really should have thought of - since I've been spending this week doing it - is delivering training or mentoring. Not if it's routine of course, but for example the training I was giving this week was to a client who worked under an organisational and legislative regime that I was not wholly familiar with, so I was having to adapt it to them and listen almost as much as I talked. This was a fairly extreme case (it was an early trial of a course I'd written for the client, so as I was delivering I was thinking about how I could improve it), but works at a much smaller level. For example, spending an hour reading a technical manual on a piece of equipment and then spending an another hour explaining it to a junior member of staff could be 2 hours CPD if that second hour was helping you to really embed it in your head (and understand where their misunderstandings lay), as training and mentoring often does.

Can I suggest a different approach to CPD than that which is commonly taken (and which leads to questions similar to this being asked)? The purpose of CPD is NOT to get CPD "points". The purpose of CPD is so that you stay employable and trustworthy as a professional engineer. When you look at it that way around it either becomes much easier to find CPD you are doing all the time - or to identify that you are at risk of redundancy in the future (I'm being deadly serious here) because your knowledge is drifting out of date, and hence to decide what you need to do about it.

That's the whole reason CPD became part of UKSPEC, and hence a professional institute membership and registration requirement, we don't want people calling themselves engineers who are out of date with current practice in their field.

Think about it that way, and you can start to realise that if you are staying employable then you will have been keeping your CPD up to date, and it then "just" becomes a matter of thinking back over the past year and think what you learned new and how you learned it. (Many, possibly most, engineers will be achieving way over 113 hours a year.) And if you didn't, then maybe you have bigger issues to worry about than whether the IET will give you a slap on the wrist! 

As my message above, I think the key is to keep it in proportion, you don't have to have learned earth-shatteringly new stuff, just new (or updated or just refreshed) to you. What problem did you have to solve which you hadn't had to solve before. Which bit of technology are you using this year that you didn't use last year. And don't forget this includes management issues, working with other staff, dealing with a client in a slightly different sector, and of course having to comply with an update to a standard or legislation.

I'll admit I hate CPD certificates with a passion (oh dear, I think the heat might be getting to me!), if I'm interviewing someone for a job I don't really want to know how many seminars they've dozed through in the last year, but if instead they've worked out some new tricks in a programming language that's made a product more reliable then I'm very interested - that's someone actively doing CPD. (Of course if they can show something they actually learned from a seminar then that's CPD, but for me the evidence is what they learned, not the certificate.)

Off to my workshop now for this afternoon's CPD (it's my day off) working out how to mend a 1970s Stylophone...volunteering at a Repair Cafe once a month gives me 48 hours CPD a year by itself - I certainly didn't know how mend rattan chairs this time last year!