Institution news
Dear Member,
Tuesday is Chinese New Year’s day. It is to be the year of the Earth Pig. Last week of course it was the 172nd anniversary of our own founding. We were ‘born’ in the year of the Fire Horse. It therefore seemed appropriate to start this note with a reminder of what the horoscopes would have us think are our own characteristics.
www.chinesenewyear.net would have us believe that “These Horses are bright and energetic. As natural leaders, they are the trendsetters. With their skills and support from friends, they are able to solve any problem. However, they sometimes don’t take criticism well.” So there you go.
As ‘natural leaders’ however it is great to be able to report the Engineering Council statistics that have just been published for 2018. Once again, and for the 7th year in a row, our Institution has ‘topped the table’ for popularity amongst the 35 bodies who are accredited to confer personal registration. Indeed this year, with 3,593 new registrations, we’ve beaten our own previous record set in 2017. It’s a huge credit to both the employees and to the active members around the world who support all of these applications without at any time dropping their standards. Reflecting a 22.5% increase in registrations over last year, they deserve our thanks and recognition for the brilliant work they do.
Collaboration nevertheless remains an important part of us being effective as a profession. It was great this week therefore to see events take place in London that showed how we can already work effectively across the disciplines. We know that it is something that our Council and Trustee Board want to see us do more. Monday saw the publication of a great analysis of the challenge of producing enough engineering talent in the UK. If you have time to read it www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/engineering-skills-for-the-future you may well find some similar themes to your own experience. The inside cover acknowledges the work that we and others did in performing the analysis. As you’ll see, the underlying issue remains our inability to attract a more diverse population into our profession. There just aren’t enough ‘STEM Devotees’ to cope with the increasing technological society in which we live.
Tuesday then brought a meeting of senior staff from all of the engineering Institutions to acknowledge the challenge of the digital revolution on our operations. As we were all created in the pre-computer and certainly pre-internet age, we are finding that we are having to “run to stand still” in keeping up engagement with our memberships. We all find that WhatsApp groups, Twitter followers, LinkedIn communities and even Facebook postings can be much more relevant and current than our own central offerings. They only reach their own supporters of course, not the whole membership, but they set the pace that we need to follow. An important, and expensive, example is that our own By-Laws allow us to communicate digitally with you, and yet our culture means that we still use the postal system for anything that we consider important. Both the Annual General Meeting notice and the subscriptions notice are printed and mailed out to you. That’s £75,000 each time, or £150,000 across the two of them. It would be great to get your views as to whether you would be concerned we were downplaying their importance if we were to use digital communications instead, with the majority of you who have given us that permission.
Apologies that this is the second week in a row that highlights how we spend your money but we really do want your thoughts on how we might be more efficient without compromising the service and accessibility for our members. We have our Finance, Governance and now our Code of Conduct reviews running and so it is all part of letting you know the openness that we want to create in making sure we do our very best to be ‘improving the world through engineering’. Do let us know what you think.
Thank you,
Colin Brown
Chief Executive (Interim)