Taking professional registration guidance online

Working from home being the new normal for many engineers at present has required big changes to the way IMechE staff work on a day to day basis. Pioneering some of these changes is the Business Development Manager for Scotland, Sandra Mulligan who has worked with IMechE for almost 20 years.

Throughout her time at IMechE, Sandra has guided thousands of engineers through the process of gaining professional registration., through a combination of events including:

• membership surgeries - where potential applicants have the opportunity for private face to face meetings
• Open ‘Get professional Registration’ events in the evenings, usually run with the Area Committees to provide employees in the local areas and SME’s with an opportunity to have guidance and support towards gaining registration.

Applications workshops have also been extremely popular in both the UK and overseas in recent years. These have been arranged as in-company or university events but also as open workshops where a variety of staff from industry and academia attend. They are used to coach candidates through the process of writing up applications for registration and preparing them for their professional review interview. The format is quite straightforward: candidates, with appropriate academic qualifications and work experience, attend the venue with their laptops and write up their application forms. They are given feedback on what they have written up regularly throughout the day. The goal is to have a well-written application ready to submit at the end of the session, or shortly afterwards. These workshops have proved to be very popular and regularly take place at a huge variety of locations.


A 'traditional' applications workshop

With the current lockdown measures in place, Sandra has transposed these face-to-face workshops to online events. Sandra said,

"As everyone is doing a lot more webinars, online meetings and calls, while working from home, I felt that trying to change the six-hour workshop in to an online event would be quite a challenge. I felt it would be very difficult to maintain engagement for that duration. As a result, I amended the format to deliver it over 5 days, to suit staff working from home and trying to juggle work commitments, childcare and everything else that we’re all trying to cope with at present!"

So far, two blocks of these workshops have taken place with attendees joining in from locations all over the UK and Dubai and Australia. Feedback has been very positive; attendees commented that they appreciate the one to one guidance, reviews and support. Sandra said,

"Breaking the workshop into smaller sessions works well in that attendees have time each day to mull over the topic and reflect on their answers. As a result, questions are more thoughtful and measured and the quality of applications being submitted for review is high.

"One big difference is that in a face-to-face workshop, as the facilitator, you can pick on the facial expressions and body language of attendees. For example, you can see if someone looks uncertain about something, they can be discreetly approached and support can be offered. This is quite different when delivering a session online and makes it more challenging for the presenter. The positive feedback from attendees after these trial events indicates that we’re managing to communicate effectively during these online workshops, which is great. Online delivery also allows applicants much more flexibility and choice as we now have a huge selection of events available to support applicants."

The next lunchtime sessions will start on 1 June. Details of all the events arranged by the Business Development Team are on our new IMechE at Home page and attendance is free of charge. If you would like to book a space at one of Sandra’s lunchtime workshops or another session, please email bdm@imeche.org.