Training Courses - How do you take yours?
It is obviously important for engineers to undertake Continued Professional Development (CPD) - but this can be particularly challenging in the current economic climate.
To help engineers meet their obligations, SCI is widening the ways in which CPD on steel design can be delivered and received. One of the Institute’s objectives is to enhance skills and awareness, by keeping delegates up-to-date with latest changes to industry and best practice. SCI’s course base covers a wide breath of subjects, including frame design, connections, bridges; curved steel, building design to EC3, composite floors to EC4, floor vibrations and light gauge steel.
Courses are currently delivered either through publicly run courses, which are one or two-day courses run throughout the UK and Ireland. In addition to the public courses, in-house training is becoming more attractive to companies. These in-house courses are generally run at a company’s premises (or at a local venue) and often involve other local companies. This can be a very cost effective way to train a number of people at the same time with benefits of reduced travel and accommodation expenses and perhaps most importantly, less time out of the office and away from production. The nature of in-house training means it can be more flexible in terms of what can be delivered - course content can follow the already available public course programmes or can be specifically designed to compliment a company’s training requirements.
Recognising the challenges of travelling to a central location to attend a course, SCI is developing live, online training sessions, delivered over the internet. The delivery system allows live video and audio, so the lectures can be delivered in real time. Course resources, such as additional notes, and worked examples, can be downloaded, and delegates can interact with the lecturer. One neat facility is that the lecturer can “share” the desktop and any programme running on that computer. This makes it possible to use a variety of resources during the course. Initially, the training courses on offer by this route will be our traditional courses, although these will be divided into shorter blocks and delivered in several online sessions.
Our early trials have shown that it is difficult to give proper attention to an on-line event for a long duration, so our intention is to deliver a course for a few hours over a small number of weeks. The intention is that courses can be delivered just so long as a reasonable internet access is available, and audio/visual facilities are available.
SCI hopes to provide everyone with the opportunity to train in one form or another over the next few years, and will be launching their new initiative for “live” On-line learning early next year. Details and further information will be posted on the courses website in the near future. In the meantime if you want to attend any of the public courses or run internal training please contact Jane Burrell on 01344 636500 or look at the website www.steel-sci.org/courses
For futher information, please contact:
Sandi Gentle
Courses and Membership Manager, SCI
s.gentle@steel-sci.com
Tel: + 44 (0) 1344 636544