How quickly time flies by – this is already my second column which I feel reflects how much is going on within your Institute. I’m certainly energised by all the activity I see happening, some of which I’ll summarise here.
The new year got off to a great start with our regular quarterly meeting of the full Council on the 3rd February. Several important topics were discussed resulting in a decision to invest some of our cash reserves in a managed portfolio and the approval of a new approach to deliver our cathodic protection (CP) training.
All of our CP courses have or are currently being updated, and are compliant with ISO-15257. Our CP training is now booked through the Corrosion Prevention Association (CPA) and details can be found on the ICorr website. We also have a brand-new CP training centre at the offices of Corrosion Control Services Limited (CCSL) in Telford. I would like to thank the CPA, CCSL, Brian Wyatt, Chris Spence, Chris Wozencroft and all the members of our CP Governance Board (CPGB) for their hard work in bringing this to fruition.
During March, a personal highlight for me was being able to deliver the President’s Address. Traditionally this has been done in person at a regular meeting of the London Branch but this year it was a virtual meeting due to covid-19 restrictions. Whilst it’s frustrating not to be able to meet in person, a positive outcome was that we had a large attendance from as far afield as the USA and India. This has made me reflect on how we do some of our meetings once we are free from the restrictions and I’d welcome any thoughts you have on this using the email address below.
Since we created this new email address, I’ve been delighted with the messages I’ve received and some of the great ideas for how we can improve. Many of these relate to improving our membership database and website to allow you to update changes to your personal details yourself and improved ways of paying for training courses and fees. I’m already in discussion on these ideas and plan to initiate an improvement project to address them. Thank you for your input, please keep it coming.
Whilst I was preparing for my President’s Address, I reviewed some of our membership and digital data. Our membership continues to grow as the above graph shows.
This is really encouraging – and the graph does not even include our sustaining company members.
I was particularly struck by the fact that 30% of our members are now from outside the UK and that we have significant representation in the Middle East. This has led to some preliminary discussions on how we can support those of you who do not live in the UK – more to come on this, I hope.
We are getting “noticed” on social media and now have over 8,600 followers on our two LinkedIn sites – not bad when you consider we had zero in February 2020! Hopefully you’ll have found some of our blogs on social media both interesting and informative – if you have any ideas for topics we should include, just let me know.
Until next time,
Bill Hedges, Institute of Corrosion President
Email: president@icorr.org
