How CPD is helping one engineer prepare for retirement

At the age of 67, Andrew Matters has no intention of hanging up his tools, even in retirement, and that means his CPD is more important than ever.

Andrew Matters has had a long and varied career in engineering, and is showing no signs of slowing up. He still continues to work for BAE Systems, and plans on doing so for at least the next couple years, but this has not reduced his focus on CPD.

Andrew believes that CPD has three fundamental purposes: reviewing where you have been, helping you to keep up-to-date in order to do your current job, and preparing you for future progression up the career ladder.

For Andrew, his seniority and position in his career trajectory means that it is this second pillar that is most important for his own development, but he says that even this has changed as he has taken on more responsibility and stepped away from day-to-day engineering tasks. 

“I have to undergo a lot of training to just stay where I am, but now that is often not the complex mathematics of thermodynamics,” he says. “It is more things around safety, ethical positions and data protection.”

Andrew says he does a lot of training that helps him in his day-to-day work, including topics such as risk management, scheduling and improving his knowledge of financial controls.
“In a senior position like I am, you don’t often get involved in the hard engineering,” he adds, “but you have to keep up to date with a lot of the peripheral activities that are required for a complex engineering project.”

But his senior position within engineering, and the change within the focus of his job, does not mean he has given up entirely on planning for the future.

“When I retire, I do not intend to sit around and do nothing and get in my wife’s way,” he says. “I am already limbering up to take on a job working on the Canal Trust locally to restore a length of canal that has been disused since 1914.

“They want me to be head of the engineering team, but it is civil engineering not mechanical engineering, so I am having to learn a lot about how that industry works, as well as what is involved in running a charity. I still have that desire to learn something new and a little bit different, and that means I have to carry on my CPD, even into retirement.”