CPD Declaration Dashboard

Most of mine is volunteering!

You CPD does not have to be entirely on the job, and not necessarily within engineering as you can do CPD in many different ways.

What about listening to industry podcasts during your commute to work?

And to look at it the other way around, you're probably not counting all the on the job CPD you are doing. Every new project that's slightly different, every client / customer who has slightly different requirements, let alone every new bit of technology where you have to read the manual, it's all CPD

I get involved in various technical IET webinars (I found them very useful) or in campus ( London or Guildford ) when I spare time. There are many CPD webinars not related directly to technical as Mark Tickner  said , so you can complete more of these online i.e designs , robotics, aerospace etc. I think the in-house training courses gives you a chance to gather like 2 full days CPD hours which is great , and from the other hand you got loads of 1 hour free webinars to follow when your availability allows. Is a challenge to gather them CPD hours when you need to keep up with the busy lifestyle. 

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that you are at risk of redundancy in the future (I'm being deadly serious here) because your knowledge is drifting out of date, and hence to decide what you need to do about it.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institute membership and registration requirement, we don't want people calling themselves engineers who are out of date with current practice in their field.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!

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.

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

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.

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).

Thanks Lisa   I'm going to look into this!