Registrar & CEO's Message
APEGA
Jumpstart Your Autumn Calendar With a Commitment to Success BY JAY NAGENDRAN, P.ENG., QEP, BCEE, FEC APEGA Registrar and Chief Executive Officer
Leaves are changing colour and will soon carpet the ground. Ominously, furnaces are kicking in, and in no time the mornings will legitimately qualify as bone chilling. But autumn isn’t entirely about dreading what’s to come. It can also be looked at as the beginning of a new year, and not just for fulltime students. Many future engineers and geoscientists view this season as bursting with hope and promise. Perhaps you can adopt some of that school’s-in enthusiasm (if you haven’t already) and dedicate it to our shared enterprise: the successful self-regulation of engineering and geoscience in Alberta. We are in this together. You regulate your own practices of engineering and geoscience. We regulate you in the overriding sense. My staff and I are charged with turning into action the strategic direction we receive from Council. A Council elected by you, I should add. Using our complementary roles as a lens, let’s look at how APEGA is successfully regulating the professions—and what you can do to support us and your own practices. Two side notes. More in-depth material on the items mentioned here can be found on our website. To find out more, check out the link box that appears with this col- umn. Also, you’ll no doubt notice that some items aren’t regulatory in the strictest sense of the word. No mistake there. I believe a strong supporting suite of membership services is essential to successful regulation. SUCCESS THROUGH PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT What We’re Doing: APEGA offers pertinent professional development sessions, skillfully delivered
by qualified presenters. We’re taking registrations now for a great fall lineup. Most of our offerings centre on value-added sessions that are designed to appeal to a large cross-section of the membership. We also avoid competing with sessions already offered capably and affordably by technical societies and others. Our fall sessions, underway now, cover project management, financial performance, ethical decision- making, leadership, communication for success, and more. Because of its broad importance and relevance to many industries, one technical session is on tap, called Isolation Techniques in Piping Systems to Prevent Major Loss Incidents. We don’t just believe in lifelong learning. We—and the legislation that guides us—insist upon it. Right now, we’re working hard to make our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) program more effective. Last year, in a 2017 pilot project to optimize the administration of mandatory CPD, we reviewed and studied the detailed submissions of 100 members. What we learned is that reporting needs to improve. A number of causes are behind this, one of them being that members don’t always understand how or what to record. We’re committed to making the whole process clearer to members. We don’t have the details worked out yet, but part of that will be a modernization of our CPD reporting tools. What You Can Do: Take charge of your personal professional development program. Identify gaps in your skills, whether technical or non-technical, and find good courses and sessions to fill them. Have you been ignoring the reporting requirement under our CPD program? Face up to it now. Learn how to properly categorize and report your CPD hours. It
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