Institution news
Continuous professional development (CPD) is an obligation on all registrants. Recording evidence of CPD is a mandatory requirement , an activity that all Eng Tech, IEng and CEng members commit to doing when awarded professional registration. The Institution is obliged to contact 5% of registrants every year to request and later review their evidence of CPD.
Sandra Mulligan, Business Development Manager in Scotland reports,
"I ran some CPD workshops in Aberdeen and Edinburgh earlier this year and I was surprised to see that members at these events were not aware of all the valuable CPD resources that their IMechE membership allows them to access.
"As a result, I decided to arrange some webinars to explain our CPD requirements in a little more detail to a wider audience. Most importantly, I really wanted to raise awareness about how using IMechE membership can allow members to access many valuable resources free of charge."
Sandra arranged and delivered two webinars in May, feedback has been great and more are planned.
Let’s share some of the questions that were put to Sandra during the webinars….
Q: ‘What is the difference between Initial Professional Development (IPD) and CPD?
A: Quite simply, IPD is the process of developing competence in order to gain professional registration. CPD is the process of maintaining and extending competence. It begins at the start of a career and continues until retirement. CPD is all about honing your current skills, developing them and learning new ones.
IMechE has a number of programmes available for recording IPD, these include Monitored Professional Development Scheme (MPDS), the Supported Registration Scheme (SRS) and the Developing Engineers Programme (DEP). Typically, a developing engineer uses one of these platforms or indeed, their own in company tools, to record evidence of IPD. When registration is achieved, a member can move on to use the tools within Career Developer, their own company records, or their own spreadsheet for example, to record evidence of CPD.
These are numerous definitions of CPD, the IMechE approach is CPD is personal and reflective. Through reflection, learning is integrated, internalised and personalised. Think in terms of activities that are proactive and conscious rather than passive and reactive.
Q: What counts as CPD?
A: The IMechE approach to CPD is about learning outcomes. CPD activities will vary depending on where you are in your career and what you are aiming to achieve. If you are at an early stage in your career and you have ambitious career plans, then you will need to have much more detailed and extensive CPD plans than an engineer who is approaching retirement will have.
Sandra has devised the following acronym as a quick way of keeping track of CPD activities – SAVETY, (yes, it’s a bit corny but it works!) The following list provides some ideas, it is not an exhaustive list:
- Self study: Reading books or journals, conducting research - IMechE Library can help, reading PE magazine or other relevant technical publications
- Academic study: Gaining an additional academic qualification, distance learning, MOOC
- Volunteering: Mentoring, acting as a PRI assessor, serving on your local region or area committee, getting involved with Division & Group committees activities, working as a STEM Ambassador, any activity where the skills developed are transferable
- Events: Organising, attending or speaking at conferences, seminars, technical visits exhibitions or local events
- Training: Technical courses, elearning, delivering training courses, soft skills courses, watching webinars – there are over 60 hours of IMechE webinars on IMechE's Webinar Hub and YouTube channel, ideal for CPD and free of charge to access
- Your career – the work experience you gain on a day to day basis, secondments, managing projects, taking on more responsibilities.
A learning log updated on a regular basis allows you to reflect on your CPD quickly and easily and to manage your CPD effectively. It’s also important to recognise and record all the spontaneous and ad hoc activities that you action during the course of your day to day job. For example, a technical term or process that you’re not familiar with is mentioned during a meeting. Afterwards, you conduct some research about it over your lunch break. That’s CPD.
Sandra summarised,
"As a registrant, you have a professional obligation to undertake CPD to remain competent throughout your working life. From the engineers I speak with on a day to day basis, I believe CPD is something that members actively do, but many are not good at recording it.
"I hope that these webinars will help to change the widely held view that CPD can be chore. The goal is to provide members with a clearer understanding of how IMechE can assist with the achievement of CPD goals, through using the tools we provide which help members to identify their needs and organise their CPD".
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