Continued Professional Development
in Blog
Continued professional development (CPD) covers activities that contribute to the development of new skills and the refinement of existing skills. It is important to formally track and document growth in experience and knowledge; and doing so can be considered an investment in one’s career.
Geoscientists in Australia and New Zealand are self-regulating. While medical and engineering fields generally require registration and licensing in order to practice, no such restriction applies to geologists. An exception to this is the AusIMM Chartered Professional status, which enables members to report exploration results as Qualified Persons.
Graduating with an Earth science degree is thus a major milestone, enabling one to begin a geoscience career. The completion of tertiary studies also signifies the beginning of the next stage in professional and technical development over the course of a career.
The point at which the geoscientist should begin tracking their professional development thus comes early in the career. The benefits of ongoing skill acquisition and reporting are self-evident: commitment to ongoing development reassures a potential employer of your attention to detail, and that your knowledge of best-practices is up-to-date. Furthermore, records of CPD allow the professional to identify shortcomings and gaps in their knowledge, and thus provide a direction for future improvement. Finally, comprehensive record keeping will ease the eventual application for an AusIMM membership and Chartered Professional status.
I intend to record my own professional development on this site. To begin with, I have a number of software packages and other concepts I wish to refamiliarize myself with. These include geomodelling (using software such as Leapfrog, Surpac or Vulcan), geochemistry (IoGAS), and spatial tools such as ArcGIS, Micromine and Infomap.
-F. D. A. Garrity, MSc
