Spring has indeed sprung, the grass has risen, and the wings are on the boid. With hospitality open, face to face meetings and remembering where your work clothes live, the year is starting in earnest.
With such lovely weather on this bank holiday weekend, I hope to share the stories from the community from the last month; in this edition of the newsletter, we have myself talking about the early career advocate role, Adam giving an update on the Communications Working Group, and Olivia reporting on our recent student events.
With all this going on and the new president supporting progress across the society, it looks to be a busy year. While working with IT, it is too easy to let the day slip into night, and we have spent the past year striking a balance; as things start to shift again, be cognisant about your requirements and wants. Take time to enjoy the important things to you and ensure the transition to your new set of circumstances is as mutually beneficial as it can be.
So for those working this weekend, thank you for keeping the lights blinking, the systems supported, the incidents managed, and IT being the ubiquitous thing that it is. For those who don't have work, enjoy your time off, and with options opening up for what we can do, I hope you have something extraordinary planned, even if it is to stay in and do nothing because nothing is always fun.
I hope you have a fantastic month of May and that you can find your balance.
John Dyer
Chair of the Early Career Executive
Early Careers Advocate
So March brought the approval of a new committee position for member groups, the Early Career Advocate. The role is a new way of working for us, and we want to get the most of it. The advocate's role is to be the voice of early-career professionals to the committee and HQ; they are also the conduit to support your committee and HQ to better engage with the early-career audience.
As an aside for those not aware of us in the Early Career Executive, we are supporting work being undertaken across the society to help those who are just starting this career in IT; they might be students, specialism changers or industry switchers.
You could see an advocate doing many things; here are some of the possibilities. They might be advising the committee how to the best communication channels to engage the indeed audience. They could be a friendly face before or at a new member's first meeting. They could be gathering case studies and requirements from early-career professionals about their experiences getting to where they are now and what they want to get to the next phase of their career. They might be running a poll during an event to gather questions, especially when someone might not want to ask for fear of looking silly.
The mandatory position sparked a lively conversation on Basecamp, and we have been working hard to address the points raised. Please feel free to drop in and share your thoughts on the role; you can find the thread here on Basecamp. We are still working on getting the matchmaking set up to match volunteers to a group in need. We are going to advertise the positions nationally to ensure that there is no shortage of applicants. We have an advocate network set up and will start seeing that grow as committees appoint professionals to the role.
At this moment, we have a handful of advocates onboarded, and we welcome them to the community. We look forward to welcoming more and getting the full executive to riz like the spring.
If you have any questions or comments, we are on the community forum basecamp, or you can email us at earlycareers@bcs.org.
John Dyer
Chair of the Early Career Executive
PPP Working Groups Update
Communications
At the last member’s convention early this year, I joined a session to talk to members about the Communications Working Group. A group of volunteers has been meeting since February and discussing how BCS communications can be improved for the benefit of the community.
We’ve been through lots of output from previous conventions, as well as the input we received at the meeting. Some of the feedback we received was that we needed to ensure we gathered input from the wider-BCS community - not just the active volunteers who have time to attend conventions.
So what have we been doing since then? We’ve been working on three important areas. Firstly, we have been building a working understanding of the many communications channels available, and we are planning to survey the whole membership on their preferences relating to these channels. We have some views, but we have a limited fact base to support this. We’re working with the marketing team on this, so please keep an eye out!
While we have been preparing that, we have also been starting on a few other things. We are seeking approval for a proof-of-concept for a Discord chat server and discussing this with the Early Careers Executive and others. We are also talking to the BCS web team about their roadmap and a potential project to improve intra-member communications.
Finally, while we wait for the survey results to guide our work, we are doing some activities jointly with the Member Groups Review team – chaired by Charlie Houston-Brown. Specifically, we are looking at how committees can better personalise communications with their members. You will hear more about the Member Groups Review work in the next month - as they have been equally busy.
On 19th May, at noon and 17:30, Darren O'Sullivan, BCS Membership Product Manager, will be joining Jon Jeffery on a webinar to provide member group committee members with an update on the campaign.
It was a great pleasure to share the new positioning and campaign for membership with everyone who attended the convention. It’s taken a lot of planning to ensure this is pitched correctly and will resonate with different audiences and their needs from a professional body. Our aim is to bring a clearer focus to BCS membership and of course to grow our community. We’ll be sharing some useful assets as a next step with you such as a basic slide deck, video and virtual zoom/teams backgrounds, but in the meantime we would love you to share the campaign on social media. This is so much more powerful if it comes from you as members telling others what you get from BCS and urging them to get involved. We’ve even drafted some posts that you can adapt for your platform of choice with the relevant links to include along with the hashtags #WeAreBCS#shapethefuture.
Come and join the Community on Basecamp. It's a great place to chat with like-minded individuals, share best practice and engage with the BCS Swindon Team.
We currently have 10% of the community represented. However, we want to see an increase in the community's representation, so please encourage at least one of your committee members to sign up.
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