March 2006 ISSUE
PD SPOTLIGHT
The Making of a Conference II
BY NANCY TOTH, MA
Manager, Professional Development
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(Second in a two-part series)
APEGGA Executive Director & Registrar Neil Windsor, P.Eng., has made two major contributions to this year’s Annual Conference Professional Development Days.
It was Neil’s proposal that we initiate a half-day pre-conference seminar specifically for executive delegates. He had heard Michael Canic, a particularly powerful speaker on leadership, who he believed would make a great contribution to the 2006 conference.
A Canadian by birth, Michael will come to us from a States-side consulting group. His Executive Track seminar is set for Wednesday, April 19.
In addition, Neil suggested Scott Taylor as a speaker for the Professional Development luncheon. Mr. Taylor, a military expert, speaks on the first day of the full PD streams, Thursday, April 20.
A former professional soldier, a war correspondent and a journalist, Mr. Taylor was captured and held hostage in Iraq. Tortured and repeatedly threatened with behead-ing, Scott was released and has since been back to Iraq several times to help train other personnel.
Mr. Taylor is widely considered the voice of the Canadian soldier, challenging government and military leadership in his Ottawa-based magazine Esprit de Corps.
At the 2005 Conference in Calgary, one of the well-attended seminars was High Performance Leadership, presented by Katharine Bondy of Western Leadership Inc. As the numbers in the seminar increased beyond 70, I learned Katharine was getting assistance from her partner.
Upon inquiry I discovered this was as it should be — after all, he’s an APEGGA member who’s also trained in human resources. Rob Macdonald, P.Eng., has the Canadian Human Resources Professional, or CHRP, designation. He has 10 years of experience with Western Leadership Inc.’s skill-based learning modules and years of experience in HR training people in soft skills.
We knew this seminar was one we have to offer members in Edmonton and area.
We are very pleased to have secured as luncheon speaker on the second full day of professional development, Friday, April 21, the distinguished and well-known safety expert Dr. Louis Francescutti, MD, PhD. I have heard Dr. Francescutti’s inspiring speeches promoting safety and injury reduction on television and was present when he gave an impassioned presentation at the 2005 graduation at the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension.
Dr. Francescutti leads a diploma program at the faculty on workplace safety. He is an active member of the medical staff in the Royal Alexandra Hospital Emergency Department and an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. He is also the founder and current director of the Injury Prevention Centre at the University of Alberta Hospitals.
Sometimes the best-attended seminars are the ones that provide soft-skills training. This year another stream consists of two different subjects.
I initially became aware of Dr. Gabor Maté when a friend attended an international conference on the arts and medicine. Then I started hearing about him everywhere. Accountants and nurses in B.C., counsellors in Winnipeg, health care workers in Calgary, teachers in Edmonton, psychologists in Ottawa — all featured him at conferences within the last six months.
Our long-time partners, the Certified Management Accountants of Alberta, will promote the session in their e-newsletter, and we are advertising with the College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta, to assist us in bringing in this high profile speaker.
The second day of the soft-skills stream will deal with cultural diversity
as a resource. This subject is of great interest as the number of internationally
educated graduates coming to Alberta has increased and labour shortages prompt
companies to hire an increasing number of foreign-trained professionals.
The issues are many-faceted. There’s off-shore work being done and sent
back to Canada. There are Alberta companies doing business abroad. And there
is the increasingly diverse workplace.
Some companies are taking on internationally educated graduates for work experience situations. Others are providing English-as-a-second-language courses on-site.
Most of us can identify the major ethnic groups of professionals coming here, but what are their chief characteristics? More and more we find that we need to increase our knowledge about the cultures of these other groups in order to optimize our interactions with them and enrich our own lives. The issue of Aboriginal professionals has been raised frequently and an APEGGA committee is addressing this issue.
A seminar with several experts on these subjects seemed to be a necessity.
The four PD streams — two technical, one management and one soft skills — have been designed and developed with the expertise of a team of people to maximize the professional development potential of the Annual Conference. Please join us and bring your colleagues.