Is Car Maintenance CPD?

Hi Roy,


Totally agree, a few other thoughts...


Taking the "counting hours" to an extreme: attending an IET event, sleeping or chatting through it, and then picking up a CPD certificate is NOT CPD. I say extreme, but I have seen this happen over and over again. We, as a profession, need to be clearer that CPD is about outcomes not process. An hour reading (say) New Scientist and being genuinely enthused and inspired by one or two articles in it is valuable, just turning up to and ignoring a LN event is not. "Ah, but how do you measure it?" - it's called management! You cannot measure people's development in the same very simple numerical way that you can measure (say) the voltage on a charging battery, but a good manager will know when someone's value to the organisation has increased.


Which also emphasises the point that management CPD is not only relevant, but is absolutely vital for any engineers who are likely to end up supervising other engineers!


On similar lines: in any reasonably run company CPD will get measured, but not using IET tools. The engineer that insists on doing the same job the same way year after year  - "that's what I do, that's what I'm trained to do, that's what you pay me for" - will find themselves the first one out of the door come a round of redundancies. A company full of those engineers (and I've seen a few) is heading for bankruptcy. I'm certainly no fan of "new is always better", but the engineering world is always developing and no company or organisation can afford to ignore it - at the very least their staff need to understand what the competition is doing and why. So to really understand what makes good CPD an excellent start is to talk to the engineering leaders at successful innovating companies and find out how they spot their staff who are developing - and how they support their staff who are struggling to develop.


From my point of view (others may disagree) if an engineer bounds into the office talking knowledgeably in equal measure about artificial intelligence, 5G, the music being premiered at the Proms, how the Albert Hall acoustics were adapted to manage it, the reasons for the increased (or slower) ball speeds at Wimbledon, the way those speeds are measured, and the problems they're having maintaining their car then as an employer I wouldn't bother asking them for CPD certificates. Alternatively if an engineer needs coercion to attend a training course for a piece of software which they've hitherto refused to use ("because I haven't been trained on it") then again I won't bother asking to see their CPD certificate - I want to see them actually using the software!


Of course how we manage this as an external organisation, who can only afford to take a brief sample of such engineers' development, is much harder. But measuring random hours is not the answer. The CMI take a different approach which I rather like, they randomly pick Chartered Managers a few years after accreditation and ask them to provide evidence of what new things they have achieved in their work. So measuring real outcomes. But I do appreciate that many engineers find themselves (accidentally or deliberately) in positions where they may not often have opportunities to put new skills into practice.


This is really getting quite interesting...


Cheers,


Andy

Hi Roy,


Totally agree, a few other thoughts...


Taking the "counting hours" to an extreme: attending an IET event, sleeping or chatting through it, and then picking up a CPD certificate is NOT CPD. I say extreme, but I have seen this happen over and over again. We, as a profession, need to be clearer that CPD is about outcomes not process. An hour reading (say) New Scientist and being genuinely enthused and inspired by one or two articles in it is valuable, just turning up to and ignoring a LN event is not. "Ah, but how do you measure it?" - it's called management! You cannot measure people's development in the same very simple numerical way that you can measure (say) the voltage on a charging battery, but a good manager will know when someone's value to the organisation has increased.


Which also emphasises the point that management CPD is not only relevant, but is absolutely vital for any engineers who are likely to end up supervising other engineers!


On similar lines: in any reasonably run company CPD will get measured, but not using IET tools. The engineer that insists on doing the same job the same way year after year  - "that's what I do, that's what I'm trained to do, that's what you pay me for" - will find themselves the first one out of the door come a round of redundancies. A company full of those engineers (and I've seen a few) is heading for bankruptcy. I'm certainly no fan of "new is always better", but the engineering world is always developing and no company or organisation can afford to ignore it - at the very least their staff need to understand what the competition is doing and why. So to really understand what makes good CPD an excellent start is to talk to the engineering leaders at successful innovating companies and find out how they spot their staff who are developing - and how they support their staff who are struggling to develop.


From my point of view (others may disagree) if an engineer bounds into the office talking knowledgeably in equal measure about artificial intelligence, 5G, the music being premiered at the Proms, how the Albert Hall acoustics were adapted to manage it, the reasons for the increased (or slower) ball speeds at Wimbledon, the way those speeds are measured, and the problems they're having maintaining their car then as an employer I wouldn't bother asking them for CPD certificates. Alternatively if an engineer needs coercion to attend a training course for a piece of software which they've hitherto refused to use ("because I haven't been trained on it") then again I won't bother asking to see their CPD certificate - I want to see them actually using the software!


Of course how we manage this as an external organisation, who can only afford to take a brief sample of such engineers' development, is much harder. But measuring random hours is not the answer. The CMI take a different approach which I rather like, they randomly pick Chartered Managers a few years after accreditation and ask them to provide evidence of what new things they have achieved in their work. So measuring real outcomes. But I do appreciate that many engineers find themselves (accidentally or deliberately) in positions where they may not often have opportunities to put new skills into practice.


This is really getting quite interesting...


Cheers,


Andy