For Health and Safety Professionals registered with IOSH it’s now a requirement as aprt of the chartered status that CPD is constantly maintaiined and documented.
There are a whole host of courses out there with little or no merit and those that are extremely useful (not just health and safety courses).
Health and Safety Consultants have jumped on the CPD bandwagon and offer anything from one day CDM courses to 2 day DSE? I put the question mark there because I’m not sure that DSE merits anywhere near 2 days of our time. Health and Safety Professionals associate CPD with attendance at costly courses. However CPD is a mixture of both courses, reading maetrial and everyday experiences that give you the base knowledge.
We do things in our everyday lives that contribute towards CPD, attendance at presentations, giving presentations, reading industry literature. the problem is we dont note these things down enough and its always a last minute panic to ensure that we get the required points in on time. Construction health and safety is an interesting one. I’ve learnt so much from just being on site and attending design team meetings.
As a CDM Coordinator it’s imperative that we note down what we’ve learnt so that we can take it onto the next project. Having been in the industry 10 years there’s been an awful lot of note taking. CDM is about experiences coupled with theoretical knowledge but you can never really gain from a book what you can in a meeting or discussion on site.
As chartered professionals we should be maintaining this level of attention to CPD to really demonstrate our skills but sadly this is done enough.
I’ve just put a powerpoint presentation together on the merits of the CDM regs for an Architectural practice this was certainly worth a few CD points anyway.
