Is Car Maintenance CPD?

Hi Mehmood,


I think what this shows is that (as you sort of suggest in your second post) CPD is essential for everybody in the organisation. Just as there's an old fashioned idea in some areas of UK engineering that you don't need education, training and development, you just learn on the job, so the same an equally old fashioned idea exists in some areas of management. There are additional problems unfortunately in management: whereas there are not a lot of bad (i.e. actually destructive) ideas in engineering CPD there are a lot in management - mixed in with, and sometimes hard to distinguish from,  the really good stuff. Clients (generally) demand a good track record from their engineering consultants, whereas management consultants can get away with flash and arrogance. (For anyone without first hand experience yet of this, "Rip-Off!: The scandalous inside story of the Management Consulting Money Machine" by  David Craig is a slightly biased, and not brilliantly written, but very interesting read.)


So as engineers turn to managers they need to battle if necessary to make sure that they are given the opportunities to get high quality CPD (not just the latest fad) in that field such that they can motivate, inspire, and lead in an appropriate direction. The strange thing I've often found is that very few engineers actually need encouragement to do CPD in engineering, most I've known wouldn't have gone into the profession if they weren't interested in it. And yet very many of them appear to stop feeling that they need to keep learning if they become managers...as your post suggests, excellence in management is as complex, if not more so in many ways, than engineering! And absolutely can make or break engineering projects.


Whether anyone writes any of this down on any CPD record is the least of the problem...


Sport is a very interesting example here. Just as massive developments in computing technology in recent years were developed in the gaming industry, so too massive developments in management knowledge have been developed in the fields of various sports. Some companies will no doubt ignore this as trivial (just as I believe some computing companies ignored the advances from gaming machines as trivial) - which is good news for their competitors!


And a final thought - competent managers will recruit and retain competent engineers, and subtly remove the incompetent ones. Whereas there's not much engineers can do to improve the management competence in their organisations. Which, I suppose, is why I feel that for any particular organisation management competence has to come first. But we do have a responsibility in the IET to try to help those competent managers have a big enough pool of competent engineers to draw from!


Cheers,


Andy


(Actually written at home, the (recently refurbished) GWR train I got on to at Paddington was so quiet and comfortable I fell asleep! Phew, the last few Paddington to Tiverton Parkway journeys I'd had weren't like that at all...)

Hi Mehmood,


I think what this shows is that (as you sort of suggest in your second post) CPD is essential for everybody in the organisation. Just as there's an old fashioned idea in some areas of UK engineering that you don't need education, training and development, you just learn on the job, so the same an equally old fashioned idea exists in some areas of management. There are additional problems unfortunately in management: whereas there are not a lot of bad (i.e. actually destructive) ideas in engineering CPD there are a lot in management - mixed in with, and sometimes hard to distinguish from,  the really good stuff. Clients (generally) demand a good track record from their engineering consultants, whereas management consultants can get away with flash and arrogance. (For anyone without first hand experience yet of this, "Rip-Off!: The scandalous inside story of the Management Consulting Money Machine" by  David Craig is a slightly biased, and not brilliantly written, but very interesting read.)


So as engineers turn to managers they need to battle if necessary to make sure that they are given the opportunities to get high quality CPD (not just the latest fad) in that field such that they can motivate, inspire, and lead in an appropriate direction. The strange thing I've often found is that very few engineers actually need encouragement to do CPD in engineering, most I've known wouldn't have gone into the profession if they weren't interested in it. And yet very many of them appear to stop feeling that they need to keep learning if they become managers...as your post suggests, excellence in management is as complex, if not more so in many ways, than engineering! And absolutely can make or break engineering projects.


Whether anyone writes any of this down on any CPD record is the least of the problem...


Sport is a very interesting example here. Just as massive developments in computing technology in recent years were developed in the gaming industry, so too massive developments in management knowledge have been developed in the fields of various sports. Some companies will no doubt ignore this as trivial (just as I believe some computing companies ignored the advances from gaming machines as trivial) - which is good news for their competitors!


And a final thought - competent managers will recruit and retain competent engineers, and subtly remove the incompetent ones. Whereas there's not much engineers can do to improve the management competence in their organisations. Which, I suppose, is why I feel that for any particular organisation management competence has to come first. But we do have a responsibility in the IET to try to help those competent managers have a big enough pool of competent engineers to draw from!


Cheers,


Andy


(Actually written at home, the (recently refurbished) GWR train I got on to at Paddington was so quiet and comfortable I fell asleep! Phew, the last few Paddington to Tiverton Parkway journeys I'd had weren't like that at all...)