30th October 2008, 10:46 AM
Just to have my pennies worth coming from the PostGrad side of things.
During a 3 year PhD, my institution requires 30 days of Professional Development training. This is reflected in a "skills matrix". Anything you do can feasibly be included in your PD training, but it's the time you've reflected on it that counts rather than the actual time spent in a training course. Within 3 years you'll notch up massive amounts over the required limit, so not a problem. How this relates to Commercial Archaeology might be an issue as each course may take 2 hours, half a day, a whole day or even a week of individuals time.
The ultimate benefit of this is that training across the academic community is to a large extent similar, so employers know where they stand in the future as everyone has recognisable skills. Individuals choose the skills they want to learn, unless it's compulsory training so everyone is different but with similar core skills. So the 'industry' essentially invests in itself, but so do the individuals, remaining competitive in a tiny jobs market.
The IfA is based in a university, so I imagine they are familiar with this kind of thing. Not being a member, can someone tell me if there is a similar thing available from the IfA, or has been talked about?
Sounds like from some of the posts there is a drive towards CPD but without a framework of skills to base CPD upon, but I'm sure I'm poorly self-informed. This would be a good way to lead the field, helping to boost standards across their membership, but perhaps inducing more people to join?
It's really a very easy thing to do, takes an hour or so to collate what you've done in the year, fill in the relevant skill codes, write a little "what I did in my holidays, and how it made me a better person" and there you go! As I said before, whether units want to spend the time and money on sending folk on training or improving things inhouse is another matter, and as always down to "time is money!".
But if it takes your workforce less time to do the same thing to a better standard then what's the problem? :face-thinks:
During a 3 year PhD, my institution requires 30 days of Professional Development training. This is reflected in a "skills matrix". Anything you do can feasibly be included in your PD training, but it's the time you've reflected on it that counts rather than the actual time spent in a training course. Within 3 years you'll notch up massive amounts over the required limit, so not a problem. How this relates to Commercial Archaeology might be an issue as each course may take 2 hours, half a day, a whole day or even a week of individuals time.
The ultimate benefit of this is that training across the academic community is to a large extent similar, so employers know where they stand in the future as everyone has recognisable skills. Individuals choose the skills they want to learn, unless it's compulsory training so everyone is different but with similar core skills. So the 'industry' essentially invests in itself, but so do the individuals, remaining competitive in a tiny jobs market.
The IfA is based in a university, so I imagine they are familiar with this kind of thing. Not being a member, can someone tell me if there is a similar thing available from the IfA, or has been talked about?
Sounds like from some of the posts there is a drive towards CPD but without a framework of skills to base CPD upon, but I'm sure I'm poorly self-informed. This would be a good way to lead the field, helping to boost standards across their membership, but perhaps inducing more people to join?
It's really a very easy thing to do, takes an hour or so to collate what you've done in the year, fill in the relevant skill codes, write a little "what I did in my holidays, and how it made me a better person" and there you go! As I said before, whether units want to spend the time and money on sending folk on training or improving things inhouse is another matter, and as always down to "time is money!".
But if it takes your workforce less time to do the same thing to a better standard then what's the problem? :face-thinks: