Institution news
Dear Member,
This is now our fifth week of reporting from HQ on the transition following the changes brought about by our Special Meeting in May.
We have had a good reaction to our piece coming out regularly each Monday, although some questions as to why it just on our (closed, but with 27,000 members) LinkedIn group, and on the open ‘News’ section on our website.
It is therefore perhaps worthwhile reminding ourselves that we also have a Facebook account, as well as regular tweets which show much more about the day-to-day operations and achievements of our Institution. There is also the Institution's open LinkedIn page which contains many more articles of general engineering interest.
Finally of course, we have PE Magazine; we certainly plan to have more pieces in future editions about our work. Our aim with all of these is to generate feedback and comment from our membership, and we are very grateful to those of you who have taken the time to do that already.
One area that came up for discussion this week was the joint Institution project on finding the ‘missing three million’ highlighted in the Uff Report. These are the people in the UK who are in and around the core engineering registrant community who don’t see membership of an institution as being of value to them. There must surely be similar cohorts of individuals in other economies around the world. The Uff premise is that while we are not addressing their needs, we cannot truly be said to be representing the engineering profession. As well as ourselves, we have the Civil Engineers, the Chemical Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology jointly funding a piece of work to identify not only who they are, but also what their professional career support needs might be. The next and potentially final meeting of the cross-institution project group will be in two months’ time on 24 October. We should start to find out what they have discovered soon after that.
Finally, we are just starting to put together our own 2019 Operating Plan based on our goals of engaging more members and keeping our HQ costs tightly under control. The first draft will be presented to Trustees on 26 September for their review. The Council Coordinating Committee may well then ask for the Council to debate options at their next meeting on 1 November. Whatever happens, the final plan will be selected at the Trustee Board on Wednesday 5 December.
However, one factor that has emerged already is the chance to reframe the debate around our commercial businesses. It seems clear that following a period where our total reserves have been reducing year on year, that we should aim in 2019 to set up the ‘Learned Society’ aspect of the Institution to be able to fully cover its own costs.
To this end, we have already embarked on a series of cost-reductions at HQ and also set an increase in membership fees for next year in line with UK inflation (Retail Price Index). When these two effects are combined, the ‘self-sustaining’ goal of the Institution starts to look achievable. Our upcoming finance review will no doubt look in more detail at just how much overall we can repeatedly afford to spend each year. We will tell you more about the commercial businesses and how they are progressing in future reports.
Colin Brown
Interim Chief Executive