A number of MEPA employees working within the Planning and Environment Directorates have completed two and three week job shadowing experiences with four organisations in the United Kingdom and Germany as part of a project under the EU Lifelong Learning Leonardo Da Vinci Programme.

This project titled ‘Building Competence in Development Management’ is one of three MEPA projects that have been approved by the EU Programme Agency during the past two years.

The aim of this project was to enable a number of MEPA’s planning and environment officers to pursue learning opportunities in their respective areas of work, through hands-on training, sharing of experience and direct exposure to good practices adopted by their counterparts in the United Kingdom and Germany.

The Planning Officers were assigned to work with both the Coventry and Edinburgh City Councils while the Environment Protection Officers worked with the Umweltbundesamt (the German Environment Agency).

Each employee had a detailed work plan agreed prior to their overseas placement. The work included reviewing case studies, understanding the respective planning and environment systems, attending meetings and carrying out site inspections amongst the various day-to-day tasks and challenges encountered.

Planning Officer Mark Zammit said “this job shadowing experience has enabled me to gain a wealth of new experience in the planning field, mainly through a thorough assessment of common activities, which are however carried out utilising different work practices.

“These work practices provided me with a vast array of new and innovative ideas, primarily through simpler methods of assessment. The knowledge gained overseas will help me revisit the various work processes I carry out in my job on a daily basis.”

Perit Marvienne Camilleri, another Planning Officer who attended this overseas experience pointed out that “after having been given the opportunity to go through actual planning applications and discuss various planning matters with my counterparts in the United Kingdom I came to appreciate the analogies that exist between the Scottish Planning System and our local system.”

Environment Protection Officer Alfred Sharples said “from the training and discussions I held with my German counterparts specialised in waste management, I have gained new experience in particular when it comes to adopting new innovative work practices which can be implemented locally.”

Following their return back to the office, all the employees shared their experiences with other members of staff with the aim of acting as multipliers, cascading the knowledge gained through structured feedback and dissemination with their colleagues.

In this way MEPA said that it ensures that the benefits gained from the project are directly put into practice, translating into a change in the way development and waste issues are managed.

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