PROFESSIONAL DEVELOMENT
Sayed Hussaini, P.Eng. Fort McMurray
I work with the outreach program for APEGA in Fort McMurray, for the branch, so I’m attending to learn about what APEGA does and how to engage with peo- ple. I’m learning how to network and how to encourage people to take part in APEGA events. My interest is to work with students, to talk to them, to encourage them to be part of the engineering life, to think in different ways, to be innovative and more creative. There are a lot of things here to learn about APEGA and its role, things you can take back to your community and explain to the people there. You can represent APEGA and spread awareness of what APEGA does. When you do something like engineering, you want to pass it on to others. When there are others coming into your professions, they should start from where you left off. It’s the long picture, and it goes beyond the individual. The speaker at the plenary session made a good point: that when you innovate things you should always take care of the users. Make sure that the design is meeting what is actually required. The legislative review session was really infor- mative. It’s good that we are in partnership with the Government of Alberta. It’s been over 30 years since a major renewal of our legislation, and technology and so many other things have changed. We really need to focus on what APEGA can legislate and regulate.
Derrick Koenig, P.Eng. Calgary Presenter: Mindfulness-Based Safety for Increasing Attention to the Task Professional development is important, because engineers and geoscientists must stay on top of current topics. Obviously, we are obligated to fulfill our continuing professional development requirements. But as members of APEGA, it’s also important stay on top of emerging technologies and trends. In my case it’s business trends I’m interested in. So I learn a lot coming to PD events like this one. We need both technical and soft-skill professional development. As engineers, we quite often have really good ideas, and we’re very innovative and creative people, but we struggle with the ability to communicate those ideas, which is critical. Otherwise, the ideas never go anywhere. By my definition, a creative idea that is not implemented is not innovative. The conference is also great for networking— meeting individuals in different industries and learning about the challenges they’re facing. The session on APEGA’s authentication guideline I’m particularly interested in. I know it hasn’t been updated in quite a while, and it is probably the guideline that I’ve used most in my career. So, I’m curious about the discussion. For the session I’m putting on, I hope people take away the idea of looking at other business models and economic models. That they evaluate whether there’s a place for some of those models in our professions and in our industries. The plenary speaker this morning talked about looking outside of our silos, into what others are doing. That fed in well to my topic today.
32 | PEG SUMMER 2018
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