Welcome to 2022 – by the time you read this it will be the end of February and a bit late to wish you a happy new year – but I do hope 2022 is a great year for you both personally and professionally.
As we came to the end of 2021 several events occurred that give me confidence that some level of normality is returning. On the 22nd November we held our Annual General Meeting (AGM) at The National Motorcycle Museum near Birmingham. It was a fantastic venue and I want to thank Paul Segers for organising a great day which included technical presentations as well as updates on ICorr training programmes. The event was also available on-line and we had approximately double the number of attendees on-line compared to in-person. I suspect this was due to concerns about in-person events due to Covid, and it will be interesting to see if this ratio changes for events in 2022. For those of you who could not attend, the reports and presentations are available on the ICorr website in the members area and I would encourage you to have a look to see a summary of the many things going on.
It was also great to see that our finances remain healthy. ICorr continued to invest heavily in new training courses in 2021 and this resulted in a loss of £26,000. However, our training company, Correx, made a profit of £82,000 to leave “ICorr Group” with a surplus of £56,000.
The following day I took the opportunity to have several key ICorr members participate in a strategy meeting – to reflect on what’s working well and where we can improve. It was encouraging to hear that everyone had many positive stories to tell but we also managed to come up with a healthy list of things to improve. I won’t list them here except for one thing which I found very insightful – a concern that the workings of ICorr are not transparent and that decisions are made behind closed doors by “men in dark suits”! Related to this, several folks said they did not understand the purpose or roles of the various committees and people involved in the ICorr Council. My takeaway was that if these folks felt this, then I suspect many of you feel the same. For me this should be easy to fix and in coming editions I will try and persuade Brian Goldie (our editor) to include some articles from our various committee leaders to explain what they do. Since I’m mentioning Brian, I want to thank him for all he does behind the scenes to produce this great publication which I know is well received (and read !) by you.
Another clear sign that in-person meetings were back-on was the resumption of the London Branch annual Christmas Luncheon at the Royal Overseas League in London. As usual it was a sold-out event and it was wonderful to catch up with so many friends and ICorr colleagues again. Many thanks to London Branch for another great event.
My final event for the year was a presentation at the Young ICorr Christmas quiz organised by Danny Burkle. Whilst I certainly don’t qualify for admission to this great group it was a privilege to listen in to some great problem solving by the teams that took part.
In December we completed the development of the ABRACO coating inspector conversion course in Portuguese. This was presented at the Brazilian annual seminar on anticorrosion paints in December by Lucia Fullalove and Kevin Harold, who have done the hard work in making
this happen.
As always, I love to hear your comments and questions about ICorr so please keep them coming.
Until next time,
Bill Hedges, Institute of Corrosion President
Email: president@icorr.org
