Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Carlow IT & WISE; CPD, and Waste Management

Had an informal lunch today at the science gallery with PJ Rudden of the RPS Group, and who will be our President in 2011-2012. PJ, as a current Vice President, has now taken over the chairmanship of our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) committee at Clyde Rd from me, and so I was briefing him on my experiences and thoughts about the CPD work and the committee over the last year.

In addition, PJ took the opportunity to brief me on some interesting developments in the Waste Management area and I look forward to Engineers Ireland making a further contributions to national policy in this area.

I then drove to Carlow, to officially open and launch the "Wales Ireland Sustainable Enterprise" (WISE) project, a co-operation between Carlow Institute of Technology and the Welsh division of the UK Engineering Construction Industry Training Board. This is a 3 year project during which 20 Irish SME engineering companies (in the south east) and 20 Welsh SME engineering companies (in Pembrokeshire) will be selected, and then each receive a free in depth business analysis followed by 10 days free mentoring and coaching as appropriate to their businesses - for example on innovation, marketing, financial management, human resources, design issues, diversification, energy efficiency etc. The project will also look for opportunities and synergies for the combined portfolio of companies to partner together on a bilateral basis. The project is sponsored by the EU Interreg programme.

As a footnote, Carlow Institute of Technology is the first and currently only third level education institution in the country to be an accredited organisation of our CPD programme.

No comments:

Post a Comment