Thursday 22 September 2011

Technical advice CPD and Bolivia Videos

Mountaineering Instructors often work in relative isolation unless they work at a Mational Centre or somewhere else where they can exchange ideas with their peers. I enjoy my time working somewhere like Glenmore Lodge as it affords me a great opportunity to see how other people work and think about what we do. I ran a CWA for EICA Ratho this year and it was really useful to work alongside one of their staff to get a different slant on the same issues. To only ever work alone is to risk disappearing up your own arse.
Another way to do it is with good CPD. Yesterday I made the long journey to Climb Rochdale to attend a joint BMC/AMI/NICAS Workshop for climbing wall technical advisors. There was a good breadth and depth of experience there and we had seminars on: Procedures and Risk Assessment, Wall Construction, Route Setting and Site Specific Award Schemes as well as going off at various interesting tangents and over running every session.
Some of my peers seem to find such CPD honerous. I think it's very naive to believe that we can't learn from each other and besides that, which part of getting better at your job is not to like?

Here are 2 videos of my Bolivia Exped. for Adventure Peaks a month ago:



and Pt 2

1 comment:

Mike Blackburn said...

Great Bolivia vids, captures the trip well. Hope the Bolivia tourist board give you a generous tip!