The NTDC’s Centre Manager, Sara Bacon, tells us about Newcastle University’s most recent Working in Partnership Event, on 27th February this year.
The NTDC and HEaTED were happy to attend this Working in Partnership event at the impressive Urban Science building at the Helix site at Newcastle University organised by Linda Robinson, Organisational Development, and Mel Leitch, Technical Manager.
These network events take place twice a year and are key to bring together key staff involved in promoting the Technician Commitment and sharing the current initiatives and successes of the Northern HEIs involved in the partnership.
Sara Bacon, Centre manager updated on current NTDC work and announcement of the HEaTED relocation to Sheffield was reinforced with an update from Suhel Miah, HEaTED programme manager on the importance of this move.
Simon Breedon, also a specialist consultant with the NTDC gave the Technician Commitment update from a Science Council perspective and highlighted the fantastic progress that has been made by Institutions who are signed up.
Debbie Rowe from Durham University detailed the career pathways framework that has been developed for all professional staff including the technical area and showed the job families and core skills in each family together with clear progression routes and external and internal development programme.
STEMM-CHANGE: The Changemaker Placement Programme – Project manager Lucy Williams from University of Nottingham updated on the current initiatives including removing language of exclusion from recruitment, reverse mentoring and the EDI report headlines with the message to encourage more Universities to encourage their technicians to apply to the placement programme.
Creating Flexible Career Pathways & Supporting Team Science – David Tedman and Gerry Graham from the University of Glasgow. This opened up intense discussion around the Team science approach to enable all contributions to research to be recognised including technicians and research scientists who often have high levels of technical expertise but do not have a fit for purpose career path. The flexible career pathways created move across job families and can progress from grade 6 to 10, allowing the roles across technical and specialist research and teaching technicians to be seen as a continuum.
All presentations and resources from the event will be hosted on the NTDC website under our “resources” tab.
Don’t forget the Technician Conference taking place on June 24th in Newcastle with a focus on collaboration between technicians from HE and Industry as a core theme.
The proposed date for the next meeting is 21/9/20 – to be confirmed.
