2010 Professional Registration Seminars

Professional Development Standards Committee Newsletter
for examples of good practice in mentoring

Issue 1

Issue 2

It is useful to define the parameters of your relationship with your Developing Engineer at the start of the period of development.  We have created a downloadable mentor/mentee contract that you may find a helpful starting point


Checklist

Mentors need to register as MPDS mentors with IMechE and must hold either CEng or IEng registration with the EC

Mentors should ensure they are familiar with the scheme and its reporting requirements.

Mentors must ensure they familiarise themselves with the EC’s competence framework (currently UK-SPEC)

The Developing Engineer (DE) needs to register on the scheme.

Once registered, both the mentor and DE need to ensure they have access to e-MPDS (unless the engineer is an undergraduate student and using paper reporting).

The mentor should have an initial meeting with the DE to discuss previous experience, their work, planning objectives and the scheme in general.

The DE may ask the mentor to approve a previous experience claim as part of their registration. This will affect annual reporting dates.

Initial Meeting

The initial interview should ideally take place between the mentor and the DE within the first month of starting the scheme. This interview will cover a number of areas.

Previous Experience Claims

DEs can claim up to a maximum of 78 weeks previous experience if applying through the CEng route, or 52 weeks if through the IEng route. This needs to be done upon registration. Mentors will need to make a professional judgement about the relevance and level of the experience to date, and assess against the  ECUK-SPEC competences before deciding how much previous experience to credit. If, for example, the DE has been with the organisation for two months, the mentor may consider this time to be a ‘settling in’ period rather than recorded professional development.

If previous experience is claimed, this will affect the reporting dates. Previous experience approved by the mentor is viewed by the IMechE as a period completed on MPDS, and falls outside the reporting requirements. e.g. if 52 weeks are claimed, the first report due will be Year 2 Quarter 1. If an engineer starting MPDS on January 1 2010 is claiming 26 weeks previous experience, their first quarterly report will be Year 1 Quarter 3 and the first annual assessment will be due July 1 2010.