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The NTDC Skills Survey

As you will recall all technicians in academic departments were recently asked to complete a skills survey, run on our behalf by the National Technician Development Centre (NTDC), to form an integral part of the development of career pathways for technicians at York as well as highlighting the crucial, but often hidden, role that technicians play in delivering excellent research and teaching.

The Technician Commitment Steering Group is incredibly pleased and proud to report excellent engagement from technicians across the institution with an incredible overall response rate of 89% with a number of departments getting 100%.  We would like to take this opportunity to say a massive Thank You for the visibility and support you gave this survey, as well as to the many others involved in completing this substantial piece of work.

The initial headline outputs were presented to technicians at a recent TechYork event and are below for your information, clearly there is much more work to do to interrogate the data.

  • 44% of technicians are providing personal support to those around them, with the vast majority (72%) of these including professional support for students.
  • 38% of technicians who feel they have management responsibilities have received no training or development to support them with these responsibilities.
  • 15% of technicians listed themselves as Professionally Registered. People feel the main obstacles to Professional Registration are not seeing the benefit, the cost and in some cases, being close to retirement.
  • A number of technicians have requested support with career planning and also training that would help their development.

All technicians that completed the survey will now have received their own individual report based on their responses. This could be a useful document to use within the ongoing Performance and Development Review cycle.

Over the next couple of months a group of colleagues on behalf of the Technician Commitment Steering Group, will be contacting your technical/operations manager. The group will support them in interrogating the data and picking out challenges and opportunities: broadly under the headings of Technical Specialisms: Areas of Strength & Risk, Career Progression & Training, and alignment to Athena Swan. They will also support your technical/operations manager in producing an executive summary for Department Management Teams including recommendations.

Once again many thanks for all your efforts in making the running of this survey such a success and we will be in touch with you, through your technical/operations manager, to ensure that we close the feedback loop with technicians.  Please feel free to share this widely within your departments, particularly with technicians.

Brian Fulton, Dean of Faculty of Sciences

 

Technician Commitment Progress (PDF , 308kb)