Head of learning & development, Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE)
I’d never say we can do everything when it comes to training. We exist to support and represent engineers, and we focus on the things we’re good at – particularly training engineers to be better managers. By the time they come to us, they’re usually already very technically skilled and are making career transitions into management roles. CPD is at the heart of any professional body’s mission, and ours is no different.
There’s a tendency to lazily stereotype professional bodies as being commercially naive. Some people assume we can’t compete at the same level as conventional providers. But we train thousands of people, so it’s really important to have good people covering the courses, and we work hard to shatter that myth. If you thought too hard about the volume of people we train, you’d probably not cope well. Plus, there’s the risk you’d stop paying attention to people’s personal needs and requirements and stop treating them like individuals.
We’re moving towards a blended model, with both face-to-face and e-learning. That means gradually evolving online support for the courses we offer and adding an online element to them, rather than starting from scratch. We’re gradually developing online – we’ll have delivered courses in 50 countries this year, and our webinars regularly have 20 countries represented at any one time. Online learning is useful because it gives the students a greater chance to reflect. And teaching off a set of slides in a classroom is completely contradictory. It assumes everybody learns in the same way, when we know they don’t. But I think both types of learning should be blended together, not one replacing the other entirely.
It’s a real buzz training people on things they actually use. It makes you feel like you’re doing something which is contributing to society more widely. Engineering has finally begun to be seen as a profession of choice, after years suffering an apparent image problem. There used to be a myth that mechanical engineers were blokes in boilersuits with an oily rag, playing with trains, but I think that has gone away now. Engineers are problem-solvers, designers and thinkers. We’re doing something for a reason.
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