There seems to me to be a problem here, which is that CPD points mean something! CPD is something that anyone who works in some specific engineering area has to do automatically, otherwise one simply cannot do the job properly anymore. CPD was invented by academics who wanted to find more people to train, and then get the obvious monietry reward for doing so. Unfortunately, and at the same time, they wanted to reduce student standards for education in general. I have interviewed many graduates (with BSc MEng, PhD or whatever) for a number of companies. Almost all of them have been essentially disappointing in their ability to deal with an interview, in that they could not relate to anything which was not in their immediate knowledge base. Particularly asking new graduates about their degree projects leads to a blank wall of silence, and has resulted in one of these asking my secretary "where did he come from, I didn't even understand the questions"? It was not that the questions were difficult, they simply asked about the fundamentals of the project rather than the implementation, about areas which the student had not thought about. Interestingly when being interviewed myself, many interviewers have not understood the answers they were given to the question, because it went far beyond what they expected and they asked for simplification!


CPD needs to keep people thinking and aware that no one knows all the answers. It needs to be a seminar where marks are given, it needs to be very relevant to the area of interest, and needs to be led by an enquiring mind who will admit that he doesn't know it all. Why has our training been dumbed down to the point of extinction? Attending meetings is not proper CPD, inventing new things probably is. It is the pushing of boundaries that is needed to excel, which needs to be encouraged.

There seems to me to be a problem here, which is that CPD points mean something! CPD is something that anyone who works in some specific engineering area has to do automatically, otherwise one simply cannot do the job properly anymore. CPD was invented by academics who wanted to find more people to train, and then get the obvious monietry reward for doing so. Unfortunately, and at the same time, they wanted to reduce student standards for education in general. I have interviewed many graduates (with BSc MEng, PhD or whatever) for a number of companies. Almost all of them have been essentially disappointing in their ability to deal with an interview, in that they could not relate to anything which was not in their immediate knowledge base. Particularly asking new graduates about their degree projects leads to a blank wall of silence, and has resulted in one of these asking my secretary "where did he come from, I didn't even understand the questions"? It was not that the questions were difficult, they simply asked about the fundamentals of the project rather than the implementation, about areas which the student had not thought about. Interestingly when being interviewed myself, many interviewers have not understood the answers they were given to the question, because it went far beyond what they expected and they asked for simplification!


CPD needs to keep people thinking and aware that no one knows all the answers. It needs to be a seminar where marks are given, it needs to be very relevant to the area of interest, and needs to be led by an enquiring mind who will admit that he doesn't know it all. Why has our training been dumbed down to the point of extinction? Attending meetings is not proper CPD, inventing new things probably is. It is the pushing of boundaries that is needed to excel, which needs to be encouraged.