PROFESSIONAL DEVELOMENT
In Their Words Every year, the APEGA Annual General Meeting and Conference includes a selection of professional development sessions to engage members in career building, networking, and learning opportunities. We gathered the following comments, edited and condensed for publication, from attendees this year in Edmonton, April 19 and 20.
Darrah Wolfe, P.Eng. Calgary
Presenter: Never Reinvent the Wheel Again— Continuous Innovation by Leveraging the Designs of Yesterday I absolutely love professional development and I have a love of learning. I was contacted by APEGA to present, so that’s one of the reasons I am here, but I am also excited by the topics, es- pecially the focus on innovation and social good. These are things I haven’t seen as much of from the technical side of the professions, so I was really interested to come and attend those ses- sions. Sara (Haynes, P.Eng.) was great, really quirky and funny. She introduced a model, the social enterprise maturity model, that evaluates the maturity of processes in your organization, as well as the readiness of your business to transform those processes. She did a really good job of introducing the model, which I was not fa- miliar with. I’m looking at doing some work with a startup. As a new organization, it is not fully structured yet, in terms of process, so I think this will be a helpful tool. The plenary speaker in the morning talked about creativity and innovation, and one thing I took away was the value of looking outside, into multi-disciplinary areas. A lot of organizations I worked with previously really focused on profes- sional development of our technical expertise. But a lot of the conversation here is about how do we gain alignment with business leaders. There’s the people side—people like to call them the soft skills, but I like to
call them the essential skills—so when it comes to searching out PD opportunities, looking into other domains is important. I like to encourage others do to this and I certainly do it myself. It’s learning from other industries, learning from other professionals who are experiencing the same challenges but maybe have a different take or perspective on them.
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