David Holland, Outgoing Chair 2006/7
Its been a very busy year for me. The industry is very active at the moment and this has placed a very strong demand on resources especially safety and reliability professionals - as you will have noticed through the increased number of flyers with the broadsheet in recent months. With such high levels of work activity, there are great opportunities for career advancement but this places pressure on the time for training and personal development. This time pressure was noticeable amongst those volunteers working in SaRS on the council and in the branches - certainly in my own branch based in Aberdeen activity and number of events has suffered. However this heightened activity in all areas of Safety and Reliability gives SaRS a great opportunity over the coming year raise its profile in society as a whole and amongst potential future members of SaRS.
Networking, sharing of information and professional development have always been a key benefit of SaRS membership. Over the past year, SaRS has moved up a gear with the ability to offer CEng status to our members who satisfy the Engineering Council requirements. Retaining existing members is key to the future viability of SaRS. Members must feel that SaRS gives them "value" or they will leave. Feedback from members on what they think of SaRS is very important to me and the rest of the Council. This year we sent out a questionnaire on SaRS publications in order to get members feedback with a view to improving our service. We had about 200 replies and the information makes very interesting reading. It is clear that both the Journal and the Broadsheet are seen as valuable features of SaRS membership - an encouraging finding and many thanks to David Smith the editor for his years of excellent work on the Journal. Since the membership obviously see SaRS publications as an important benefit of membership we plan to relaunch the Journal in a new and improved format before the end of this year.
The broad aim of SaRS is to stimulate the development and use of safety and reliability engineering techniques for the benefit of society at large. Considering the number of safety and reliability professionals out there, we should have a lot more members - we are the only professional society dedicated exclusively to safety and reliability engineering. Our society needs to grow to secure its future to enable us to meet this laudable objective and a new recruitment committee led by John Pearce was formed to drive this forward.I am very hopeful that chartered engineer status will raise our profile and give a boost to membership numbers - the fact that we offer this is still not very well known amongst the safety and reliability engineering community. The ability to offer CEng to our members raises the status of our society and offers a key benefit to those members who are not yet chartered. This is now a strategic selling point for SaRS and Harry Hopkins and the External Affairs committee have been key to getting these arrangements in place. Harry has given branch presentations on routes to C.Eng. through SaRS and it's no coincidence that applications for C.Eng. are on the increase. One of our Hong Kong based members and someone in Aberdeen have successfully negotiated the route to chartered status through SaRS so we now have our first SaRS CEng’s - fantastic news both for the individuals involved and for SaRS. There are already a quite a few other members who have applied for CEng status - so I hope that our first CEng’s will be trail blazers. Harry Hopkins and the rest of the External Affairs committee have been working for a number of years to this end and now it is clear that all their hard work has paid off! Many congratulations to Harry and the team.
A large part of the council’s time over the year is spent planning our annual conference which by the time you read this will already have taken place. SARSS06 - The Future for Safety and Environmental Management, with 8 speakers and a keynote address by Professor Trevor Kletz I am sure will have been a great success. The North of Scotland Branch 5th Annual Dinner was attended by over 150 people - the event is becoming a bit of an institution. This year’s dinner included addresses by Dr Tony Cox, an eminent safety professional and fellow of SaRS, and Robert Patterson of the HSE. Events are a key part of our drive to raise the profile of SaRS and stimulate new members - the conference, annual dinner and branch meetings all play a vital role.
In summary, the year as Chairman has gone very quickly and our new Chairman, Mike Sleath has nothing to worry about – its quite painless. Lowlight of the year was the learning of the sad death of one of our Council members, Mike Fryatt – we will all miss him. Highlight of the year for me was seeing the first of many SaRS members becoming Chartered Engineers.