How we are renewing our pledge to the Technician Commitment

The Technician Commitment is a sector-wide initiative in higher education and research that aims to ensure visibility, recognition, career development, and sustainability for technicians.

Institutions signing up pledge to support their technical staff by improving career pathways, ensuring their contributions are valued, and promoting a positive culture for technical roles.

Recognising the sector wide issues recruiting to technical roles, the University of Essex is one of the founding signatories and part of the 140+ Universities and Research Institutes now signed up.

Being a founding signatory in 2017, the University is now on its 3rd iteration of the action plan.

How has the Technician Commitment changed over the summer?

The technician commitment has appointed two fixed-term staff, until April 2028, to deliver on the current Technician Commitment Action Plan and develop the next one.

Who are the staff and how are they involved?

Chris Spice, as the Technical Services Manager, will lead on the day-to-day delivery of the action plan, managing the training and engagement piece as well as proposing strategic direction. Jenna Hopkins, as the Project Manager, will oversee the strategic direction of the Technician Commitment.

What is happening in Technician Commitment nationally?

The Technician Commitment work continues to go from strength to strength and there are now more than 130 signatories, including the 1st international signatories.

National platforms such as the NTDC and ITSS have renewed funding to deliver their training and development opportunities as well as lead on national initiatives to help develop technical careers such as the Career Pathways Action Group, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Network and many more.

The work by the Technician Commitment has now seen most grant funders recognise Research Technical Professionals as eligible to PI grant applications, and work is continuing to push to get better representation for technical staff and their work in the Research Excellence Framework.

What is currently being worked on as part of the Technician Commitment at Essex?

We are currently looking at how, through the committee structures we have, we can give technical staff more ownership of the current, and future, action plans and ensure that there is some scrutiny on what is delivered as part of programme. We are also looking at opportunities to develop routes into technical careers through T-Level Placements and Technical Development Assistants.

We are putting in place some of the things we need to benchmark our progress, this includes revisiting the criteria for who is considered a technical member of staff. Lastly, we are trying to re-engage all technical staff from across the University to understand how the Technician Commitment can work better for them.

There is a change in language here, why are you changing the wording to Technical Staff rather than Technicians?

We want to make clear which staff are considered to fit under the umbrella of the Technician Commitment and understand that sometimes the role of technician can be hard for staff to identify with unless that is included in their job title.

Therefore, we want to engage all staff who are within technical roles at the University, this is any staff who use specialist skills and knowledge to either directly or indirectly influence the research, teaching and enterprise activities at the University.

This could be staff from those engaged in the face-to-face teaching or demonstrating techniques, to those who manage and maintain our university infrastructure, across the broad range of work areas we have at the University.

How can staff in technical roles be involved?

Thank you to the tie into T-PIKE, our technical platform for Knowledge Exchange, we have funding opportunities for technical staff to seek career development, training, networking and knowledge exchange activities.

Regular communication is sent out through the technician.commitment@essex.ac.uk email address, and please use this email to reach Chris if you would like to know more or discuss how the programme might be relevant to you.

You can also sign-up to the Technical Staff Mailing list for more opportunities to engage with our national networks.

To join the Technician Commitment email group, please click here which brings you to University’s subscription list, scroll down until you see techsuppstaff and lastly select the box next to it.