Is Car Maintenance CPD?

Hi Maurice,


Just catching up on your post, that's an interesting point about the value of formal CPD capture for early career engineers. I totally agree, and again thinking about measuring outcomes it is, of course, much harder for early career engineers to demonstrate significant outcomes. Therefore showing that they are on the way to achieving them - by taking every development opportunity possible, in and out of work - becomes vital. As you say, post-fact reflection adds a lot of value here: "I learned in my own time how to produce database in Access, which allowed me to update one that the company was using for document control, allowing it to incorporate our new change record system and saving the cost of bringing in an outside consultant". Or (true story from my past) "I have been carrying out car maintenance on my mk III Escort and (old style) Mini. I have recently started maintaining my newer Toyota Corolla (this was in 1990), and have noticed that this car is designed to allow considerably easier access for maintenance, which in turn has made me consider whether we are making enough consideration about how we design our products not just for manufacture, but also for serviceability throughout their life".


I absolutely loathed working on the Escort and Mini. Sadly at the time I couldn't afford not to...and actually I did learn a lot.


Cheers,


Andy

P.S. I've just remembered the time when I was an undergraduate apprentice on an IEE supported scheme. I'd gone back to work for the company over the Easter holidays - not as part of my formal apprenticeship, just to earn some money for car repairs -  which happened to coincide with an IEE audit of the training scheme. "That's lucky," the head of training said, "one of our undergraduate apprentices happens to be working here at the moment, he can show you his IEE logbook". I explained that I'd left it at Uni (which I had) since I was only there for work on this occasion, not for training, much annoyance all round. What I didn't tell them was that it was beautifully filled in for the first fortnight, and the next two years were completely blank! So I do know what it's like in the real world  But do as I say, not as I do...

Hi Sandy,


Once you've retired, then should any of our clients offer us a contract requiring expert knowledge of Colouring in, Cutting, and Sticking we will definitely approach you to see if we can contract you in. Does £150 per hour seem reasonable? Plus expenses of course (scissors, glue etc.)


Cheers,


Andy

When you reach the level of competence of the sixth-formers whose egg flew the entire length of the room and hit the window then it goes up to £200 per hour! I don't think any of the rest of us professional engineers ever got to that level...

Everything we need we learned in kindergarten children centers. I still use the colored pads for project planning. Colored Sticky pads do really well.

Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

And, to be a bit serious, the Egg Race - teams of four to six engineers (and some school groups) trying to move an egg as far or as fast as possible with minimal materials - is a classic of the type of development that starts in kindergarten / primary school in how to work as a team to understand and then solve a problem. We'll all have seen many real engineering projects that fail (or at least begin to fail) because of the inability of professional engineers to do this.


A bit off thread, but we do have a problem in the UK in that schools (often in conjunction with outside organisations such as the IET) are good at setting up and running such challenges, but less good - or to be honest can't justify the time - to repeat them such that the students can learn from what went wrong and develop. So the kids that are already good at team working - or who pick the brilliant engineer to be on their team - succeed. Those that don't manage this fail, but they don't really know why.


I think there's a lesson there for our professional CPD - but as I need to pack to catch a train and a plane I'd better not try and think now what it is!

My employer automatically logs all official courses I attend in the HR management system. When I joined the company they also entered all the previous courses that I had certificates for back to my degree.

I have been asked to present a couple of papers at a conference. Currently I don't consider this to be CPD for me. What do others think?


Best regards

Roger

I think it depends how often you do it - if I was presenting broadly the same paper at several conferences, and that paper was really a bit of sales blurb for the company, then I'd feel it wasn't CPD. But if it's going to mean that (a) you need to think carefully about the work that your team has been doing to present that work in a wider context such that it is valuable for the conference attendees and (b) you don't do it very often so it's at the very least refreshing presentation skills then that sounds like CPD to me.


The last conference paper I presented very definitely did both those, the act of pulling it together made me think very deeply about how and why our team do what we do, and the act of presenting it was...an experience. Like learning the fact that the lecture theatres in Savoy place don't, for some utterly bizarre reason, have clocks at the back - so when you're presenting you have no idea how you're doing for time!!! And that you need to check that the slides that are being projected are the slides that you expected to be projected...the IT person involved at SP was very apologetic about this, and to be fair to them I should have checked as well (and indeed I should have put a version number on the first slide). So definitely CPD, even though I have done a fair few presentations in the past! "C" for "Continuing"...


Cheers, Andy

I would say resolutely yes, doing presentations is CPD, wth the two caveats raised by Andy - firstly that it's not purely a sales pitch and that you don't just keep trotting out the same presentation (which is, incidentally, to me, one off the biggest criticisms I have of teachers, lecturers, professors. Even then, thr resin it still might be is of you do learn lessons from the first one which fuels a honing of both content and presentation skills - think carefully about the questions you were asked and whether they could be embraced next time round.

Personally, as a matter of principle, I have never, ever allowed myself to do that, even if only to keep my own interest going. Where possible, I have always tried to cover either completely new ground or come at the same topic from a completely new angle, but where there is demand for the same presentation, I have, at the least, honed it down, checked to see what may have changed in the intervening period, or tried to see if I can move it on a step, including taking on board issues raised in q&a.

But most importantly, the key defining factor, as with all CPD, is reflection on how it went, and what you gained from it. That will always be the ultimate defining factor, what have you gained from it, what new thinking has it provoked etc. and if the answer is yes, you have gained/learnt/refined/used it as a springboard for further thinking, then yes, it's CPD, if not, it isn't - but I'd suggest you simply never allow that to be the case.