Day February 26, 2026

There is a version of CPD that exists purely as a compliance exercise. You log 30 hours, you tick the box, you move on. Most people in the electrical sector have encountered it. Most have also encountered the reality that it does not tell you much about whether someone is actually keeping pace with what is changing in their field. 

England's electrical installation workforce has contracted by 26.2% since December 2018. That's not a statistic buried in a footnote somewhere. That's 214,200 practitioners down to 158,000 in six years, while the demand side of the equation has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Clean energy targets, housing programmes, and infrastructure pipelines are all pulling harder on a workforce that keeps shrinking. So when people talk about "supporting engineers," the conversation sometimes drifts toward the charitable end of things, the benevolent fund territory, the pastoral care framing.