If my employer sends me on a 4-day training course, then achieving 30 hours is easy.  But that doesn't happen every year.  That's what happens when you're an employee.


This year. it's been scrabbling around to get a lot of silly little things to add up to 30 hours.  It takes an awful lot of things that last 0.5h, 1h or 1.5h to add up to 30 hours.  This year, I used a free trial to LinkedIn Learning to make up a few extra hours, watching on-line videos.  But I'm running out of free trials.

Hi Simon, I'd be very surprised if work experience alone didn't get you a good way towards 30 hours (that's just the W in the TWAVES mnemonic). Doing something that adds to your knowledge - getting data from the internet, data books or text books for example - it all counts. You have mentioned things that mostly represent just the T (for training).


Perhaps you are engaged in volunteering - not necessarily engineering based but, if it's something that grows even just your soft skills, it's valuable CPD.


As engineers, we never stop learning (W & S). Technology is moving at a fantastic rate, so our CPD never stops (or we become unemployed/unemployable). What the IET and Engineering Council are doing is making recording CPD a natural part of your career, giving everyone that really powerful opportunity to continuously reflect on what we have learned.

Hi Simon,


And just to add to David's excellent note, a good way to think about this is - how many new projects have you worked on over the last year? What did you have to do to get "up to speed"? Slightly different technologies, or slightly different applications all need learning. Two days getting "into" a new project is almost half your annual CPD! Or a one day visit to a supplier of new equipment or customer with a potential new application could be a quarter of it. 


And there's all the soft skills development, perhaps attending client meetings with sales staff where you realised a bit more about how to deal with clients. Or similar with procurement staff and how to deal with suppliers. Or working with an experienced manager and realising how to resolve a staff conflict. Or taking part on an interview panel for the first time - or not for the first time but in a different situation.


And even if you are doing exactly the same tasks with exactly the same people with exactly the same technology for exactly the same applications (which personally would be making me want to look for another job ? ) the world around is still changing, I'll bet your employers have new procedures you've needed to follow, and very often there will also be new legal or technical requirements to follow.


I'd suggest that about the only way not to achieve 30 hours CPD in a year is to retire and spend all day watching football on TV...I was originally going to write my usual example of "leave engineering and run a sweet shop" but actually there's a lot of transferable skills to be achieved from doing that!


Bottom line...Don't Panic!


Cheers,


Andy