Cassandra Hodgkinson 19 October 2021 

The Technician Commitment is a sector-wide initiative led by the Science Council, supported by the Gatsby Foundation to help address key challenges facing technical staff working in research and teaching. It was launched on 31 May 2017, with the University of Manchester amongst the founding signatories. Since that launch many other universities and research institutions from across the UK have backed a pledge to support their technicians. 

Here at the University of Manchester, we are developing our Technical Commitment in a very deliberate way. Initially, our institute leads Colin Baines and Peter Crowe (then Heads of Technical Services in FSE and FBMH respectively) set about engaging with leaders across the organisation to build a support foundation for developing our commitment. 

In summer 2019 engagement sessions with technical staff across the organisation saw the start of Phase 1 of Manchester’s Technician Commitment. These sessions led by Colin and Peter, to inform the technical community of the initiative, the benefits it would bring and encouraging staff to engage and participate in order to shape how we develop the four target areas: visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability for technicians across all disciplines. 

In autumn 2019 those members of staff who expressed an interest in actively engaging came together to start Phase 2 of Manchester’s Technician Commitment. These technical staff come together to identify the key areas to pursue and develop. They were then empowered to establish working parties to “go create” and generate proposals for their particular area of interest for development. These emerged as: staff development, recognition, skills, support and wellbeing and marketing. You are encouraged to see the blog posts relating to these proposals and the people involved in bringing the ideas together. 

Just as the proposals were coming together and being submitted for the next stage of development, the global pandemic descended and everything paused for a moment. Well, a longer moment than we anticipated. You could argue that we could have used that time to develop out proposals. However, it was a tough time for us all. As many will realise, it was the technical staff across our organisation that kept many of our research and teaching areas running and delivering the best they could (and beyond) to meet our operational requirements, whilst many were furloughed or working from home. 

As the University attempts to return to some form of normality, we have embarked upon our mission in support of technical staff once again. This reawakening offered an opportunity to revisit the work that had been presented and identify a way to move much of it forward.  

This led to the idea of forming a leadership group, to provide representation across the three faculties to the development and pursuit of the proposals and our mission. On 21st July 2021 the Technical Commitment Leadership Group (TCLG) was formed: 

• Representing Humanities: John Moore and Karl Spencer 
• Representing Biology, Medicine and health: David Knight and Cassandra Hodgkinson 
• Representing Science and Engineering: John Warren and Sandra Taylor 
• Chaired by: Colin Baines 

One of the first orders of business when TCLG first met in August was to change the title of our commitment. You will notice that is has developed from Technician Commitment to Technical Commitment. This has been done in order to be more inclusive of any/all staff who identify themselves as being in a technical role, but don’t necessarily have the title “technician”. 

This now has you up-to-date with Manchester’s Technical Commitment. Visit the website to see Our Technical Commitment, the reports submitted to the Science Council about the progress made, and their response/feedback to that. The TCLG are currently reviewing and starting to action the 14 points detailed in the 24-month Progress Report, this includes developing plans for a Skills Survey to be conducted using the NTDC tool: Technician Skills, Roles and Responsibilities Audit. 

 If you have any stories or information you would like to contribute to this blog site, please send them to Technician.Commitment@manchester.ac.uk. 

Post written by: Cassandra Hodgkinson
Date: 19th October 2021 

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