Opinion piece by John-Paul Foster MIEAust CPEng NER became a member of Engineers Australia in January 2011, shortly after moving to Darwin, Australia from the UK. He is a former President of the Northern Division’s Young Engineers group, the winner of the 2012 Young Northern Professional Engineer of the Year award and was a member of the Northern Division Committee. He is currently on assignment with Jacobs in Saudi Arabia, working as Technical Director for Transportation on infrastructure projects across the Middle East.
Continuous Professional Development (CPD) means our technical skills move with the times – the same should apply to our CPD record keeping.
I thought I was being clever, having dedicated CPD notebooks to record all my training and notes from seminars and courses. Everything was in one handy place for ease of reference. But, in order for something to be handy, it needs to be close to hand when you need it; not, quite literally 10,000km away when you have Engineers Australia requiring it for your CPD audit. Yet, that was the situation I found myself in during December. If only I had switched to using an online log for my CPD.
I moved to Saudi Arabia in August 2015. As it was only a temporary move, I kept a lot of things in storage back in Darwin. Unfortunately, that included all my CPD notebooks. I didn’t think about when my CPD audit would be (it’s every five years), otherwise I wouldn’t have left my records where they were hard to get to.
You do get one month to provide your records, but with no chance of flying back to Australia to get them, and not wanting to put any of my friends through the torture of having to search through a packed storage unit during the festive season, I had to spend a lot of time racking my brains remembering what I had done and having some evidence of it – not how you want to spend your weekends over the Christmas break.
Fortunately, with the move to a new country, I have had to do a lot of learning – there’s a whole set of new codes and standards that I need to have an in-depth knowledge of. But I couldn’t just rely on that – there’s much more to it and I’d strongly recommend that you take a quick look at the Engineers Australia website and refresh yourself with the requirements.
A lot of this trouble could have been avoided. Engineers Australia has the online CPD recording system, eCPDRecord. One of the reasons why CPD is so important is that it helps us to keep up to date on advancements in engineering. So, I really should have taken that to heart and kept up with advances in the ways to record my CPD. If I had done this, then I wouldn’t have spent most of the Christmas period weekends on the audit.
So, my New Year’s resolution? Start using eCPDRecord – I’m going to start doing this right now!
More information on Continuous Professional Development, including eCPDRecord.
Image: John-Paul Foster MIEAust CPEng NER wishing he had recorded his CPD online.