Technicians' Community

The Technician Commitment is a significant initiative aimed at enhancing the visibility, recognition, career development, and sustainability of technicians, technologists, and skills specialists working in higher education (HE) and research. Launched in 2017, it represents a collaborative effort across the UK's education and research sector to address key challenges faced by technical staff. The commitment has four main areas of focus:

• ensuring that technicians are visible within their institutions
• recognizing their expertise
• providing opportunities for career progression
• ensuring the future sustainability of technical skills

The impact of the Technician Commitment within the HE sector has been substantial. It has garnered support from over 100 signatory institutions, who have pledged to take action to support their technical staff. This has led to significant cultural changes within these institutions. Improving the work environment and career prospects for technicians. The initiative has also attracted considerable investment. Both financial and in-kind, to develop and deliver activities related to the commitment. Moreover, it has leveraged external funding to support the technical community further.

The Technician Commitment is an initiative which requires institutions to make a pledge to support technicians in the key areas above. NU was a founder signature in 2017 and since then has progressed the agenda through a series of Action Plans. These are signed off by the VC and President before being peer reviewed. Feedback received on the last three action plans has been excellent.

Some of the key highlights of the Technician commitment at Newcastle that formed part of our submission to the UK-ITSS in January 2024 were:

• The action plan is driven from the Technicians Voice captured through NU TechNet events and surveys.
• Northumbria and Newcastle university held a joint TechNet meeting in 2023 which was addressed by both VCs.  Since then, there have been interactions across Teaching (VR facility) and research platforms (SIGs).
• N8 Collaborate phase 1 (£5K) and phase 2 (£25K) to build a collaborative community around Carbon Operational Net Zero and share best practice.  This is ongoing work which has been the trigger for collaboration and innovation at a national level.
• That Technicians are embedded into the RC roadmap ensures they are included and in fact were major drivers for the creation of guidelines for fair attribution of authorship.  They contributed to the Quality Time workstream and created a technical expertise brochure to broaden access to technical led facilities.
• Research Culture project fund has funded two national facing technician led conferences hosted by Newcastle University in 2022 and 2024 in addition to writing retreats.  The Research Culture development fund has also funded personal development opportunities too.
• Organisational development has created a technicians training portal on the LMS
• LTDS continue to coach and support technicians through the Advanced HE Associateship and Fellowship teaching qualification.
• We had technicians shortlisted for THE outstanding technician of the year in 2019 (Leitch and Davoll), 2020 (De La Hay), 2021 (Filby) and 2022 (Nelson) and indeed Andy Filby won this in 2021.

The Technician Commitment leads at NU are Mel Leitch and Julie Bullimore.

The Working in Partnership Technician Commitment Forum was created by Linda Robinson, Organisational Development Lead and Mel Leitch, Technical Manager, in September 2018.

The forum recognises that Technicians as a group often have limited reach within Universities to implement change however by working in partnership with Organisation / colleague developers, they can be much more effective in implementing the changes needed to support the Technician Commitment.

We aim to hold two meetings per year (February and September) in Newcastle to explore elements of the Technician Commitment and to share best practice. Initially the forum was aimed at northern universities with each sending an organisational development lead and a technical lead. We are delighted that representatives now come from further afield including Scotland and Northern Ireland. The value of attending these meetings is to engage and share best practice.

If you are interested in being involved, please contact Mel at: mel.leitch@newcastle.ac.uk