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Our Technician Commitment

tech committ

2100

Technicians
in Midlands

10%

Of England's total

700

Delegates at HETS 19

24

Funded exchange placements

1270

Equipment pieces
managed

Technicians and technical staff are fundamental to university life. They enable teaching, research and outreach activities.

As a partnership founded on supporting research excellence, Midlands Innovation recognises that ensuring recognition and opportunity for its technical community helps us to achieve our aims.

Championing the role of technicians

Midlands Innovation universities have more than 2100 technical staff working in their institutions. Since 2015 Midlands Innovation has embarked on a programme of activities designed to increase the visibility of our technical workforce, to recognise its excellence and think about collaboratively around supporting career development.

Technician Committment 

The Technician Commitment is a sector-wide initiative led by the Science Council and supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation’s Technicians Make It Happen campaign. The Commitment aims to ensure visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability for technicians working in higher education and research, across all disciplines. All eight members of Midlands Innovation were founding signatories of the Technician Commitment in 2017.

TALENT Programme 

In 2020, Midlands Innovation launched the TALENT programme in collaboration with key stakeholder and industry partners. TALENT is a project which leads and influences change to advance status and opportunity for technical skills, roles and careers in UK higher education and research.

Master Technicians commitment logo long

1800px Kelly VereDSC 7860The roles that technicians do, usually behind the scenes, are vital in ensuring the success of our universities and research institutes, providing academic, research and student colleagues with the essential technical expertise that they need to enable their research and teaching.

Kelly Vere MBE, Director of Technical Skills & Strategy for University of Nottingham

Our work in this area is led by our a Technical Staff Strategy Committee which brings together technical managers from across the partnership to support our institutional responsibilities under the Technician Commitment and to explore innovative ways in which we can collaborate to further support our technical staff.

Our major areas of activity have included:

  • Establishing the UK Higher Education Technicians Summit (HETs); a national conference for technical staff working in higher education and research.
  • Establishing the Papin Prizes; a series of awards to publicly recognise technical excellence in academia.
  • Piloting a collaborative placement programme to enable career development opportunities for our technical staff.

Future work will focus on the development of collaborative training for our technical staff and identifying further areas where collaboration can support the aims of the Technician Commitment.

More information about the Technician Commitment can be found on the website