Maximize Your Career by Leveraging Continuing Education

Continuing education is not only essential for renewing your professional engineering license or fulfilling the PDH requirements, but it also advances your career by improving your technical and engineering competency.

Countless engineers are currently pursuing these courses to improve their technical skills and capabilities. Over the years, these engineers will be far more competitive in the job market than those who rely solely on their engineering degrees. If you are looking to gain a competitive edge in the market, you need to include continuing education courses as a key element of your career development strategy.

An effective approach used by a lot of PEs is to focus your PDH course selections in a topic that aligns with your career goals. Some engineers choose to focus on their core strengths to ensure they are using the current industry standards and best practices. Others explore an entirely different engineering discipline as a way to broaden their knowledge base. You can choose to advance your career based on the courses that best suit your needs. Besides meeting your license renewal requirements and improving your engineering skills, continuing education courses can also open up new career opportunities and keep your career on an upward trajectory.

Importance of Continuing Engineering Online Courses

Whether you are looking to advance your technical skills in the field of mechanical, construction, or aerospace engineering, PDH courses can be a strategic element for developing your career. Some key reasons to sign up for continuing education training are:

• Career advancement and optimizing skills
• Retraining
• Access and support
• Integrated studies
• Managing commitment
• Viability
• Flexibility

Let’s review these in more detail.

1. Career Advancement and Optimizing Skills

As a professional engineer, it is likely you are someone who is curious about the world and how everything works. It’s the reason many of us chose engineering as an undergrad. Successful engineers leverage their passion for learning to gain more technical skills in their chosen field.

With an undergraduate engineering degree, you have the key skills to work as an engineer. As the number of years since graduating increases, you’ll want to make certain your skills are current.

Continuing education courses provide useful skills and information through the variety of courses available. With a little planning, you can optimize your skills in your chosen field while also enhancing your career. You may also be able to address some of the challenging elements of your work through new skills and strategies these courses provide.

Signing up for these courses puts you in a better position to advance your engineering skills and improve your job rank in the existing company. As a professional engineer, you need up-to-date information and confirmation that your current work practices are consistent with the state of the practice. Continuing education courses are a great way to achieve this goal.

2. Retraining

As a registered engineer, you need to complete continuing education activities every year to satisfy the board’s requirements. Learning new technical skills is critical. In addition, retraining is also important because it keeps your existing competencies sharp and fresh. An important reason for retraining is that it allows you the opportunity to verify that you’re doing your engineering work consistent with industry standards.  Keeping your technical skills current through professional training also allows you to demonstrate to others that you are qualified to provide engineering services. Retraining also helps you satisfy the board regulations and requirements, giving you more credit to handle more complicated tasks in the engineering fields.

3. Access and support

CEU activities give you access to advanced skills and knowledge, both of which are essential in managing your project work and, potentially, pursuing new job opportunities. Moreover, these courses also provide you with a form of support that allows you to learn new skills, as well as maintaining existing talents. This process is essential for expanding your abilities and, hopefully, keeping your career moving in the direction you want.

In order to manage multiple duties in the engineering field, you need to be able to maneuver through your career and acquire the engineering skills consistent with market requirements.

Continuing education will help ensure your capabilities are up to the mark with the current engineering standards.

4. Integrated studies

Integrated studies are an essential element to improving and developing your engineering skills.

As an engineer, you must have the relevant skills when a particular need or challenge arises. Waiting until the problem presents itself doesn’t allow you the time to acquire the skills or knowledge. Worse, you may fail to identify the issue because of a lack of understanding, which can lead to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.

As technological advances improve our understanding of engineering, the skills we learned in college and early in our careers can become obsolete. The engineering profession is constantly adjusting its practices and updating the standards to keep up with these changes. It is important for design professionals stay current.

An effective way to maintain professional competency is continuing education. Choose a course that meets the current engineering standards to learn new skills and practices to remain competent and relevant in your industry.

5. Managing commitment

Continuing PDH and CPC courses create an environment that promotes skills development and ongoing competency. This commitment to training better ensures you can manage your work efficiently and safely. This includes

• Satisfying and meeting your professional needs
• Ability to managing your life and
• Managing your financial commitments

6. Viability

Continuing education training allows you to keep your skills up to date while also performing your professional duties. It is an ideal way to pursue your training needs without having to drop your responsibilities.

Continuing education courses are a typical requirement for most state engineering licensing boards. As a result, you need to complete these courses to maintain your professional engineering license.

7. Flexibility

Ongoing training provides you the flexibility to set your education goals and schedule in a manner that is convenient. Planning allows you the ability to complete courses on a part-time basis while effectively managing your professional responsibilities.

You will need to satisfy the engineering board requirements to meet the minimum training hours and PDH requirements. The process may seem inconvenient and time-consuming, but it an essential part of protecting the public safety and ensuring all professional engineers are competent.

Fortunately, it is possible to satisfy the continuing education standards established by your state engineering board without spending an excessive amount of time looking for and completing courses. Most engineers use online platforms to earn the required PDH credits, all without ever having to make an appearance in the training institution.

If you are concerned about pursuing engineering courses while also meeting your obligations and responsibilities at the workplace, then contact PDH-Pro for approved courses and convenient training schedules.

Conclusion

As a Registered Engineer, the best thing you can do for your career is to become a lifelong learner. Our online engineering courses not only fulfill the PDH and CPC requirements but also enhance your technical knowledge and competency.

They offer a convenient way to update your skills, ensure your practices are consistent with industry standards, and provide your clients with the quality they are looking for.