Danielle Baker
Branch Manager – London
PO BOX 98
Kent
BR8 9AW
T: 01322 668 260
E:
25th May 2011
Dear Scotland Branch Members
Firstly, let me introduce myself, I am the Branch Manager for London. Novus began its journey in 2008 in the London Branch. Gillian Trodden FCIOB who was our Chair at the time and also a Trustee, began to see a common pattern emerging from her PDP candidates. They were all keen to become involved in the CIOB but did not at that time see a home for their skills and experience level. Gill raised this at our Branch Committee meeting and tasked two of our Committee Members to work with a group of 6 young Professionals to write a scope document, detailing what they wanted and needed from the Branch and the Institute.
After months of work a document was formed outlining clear objectives, visions and a mission statement. Novus was born! To fit Novus in to our Branch structure was simple, in London due to our small geographical area we do not have Centres, so it was decided Novus would have its own Committee structure, mirroring the Branch and sit under the Branch for guidance. It is important to mention at this time, myself and the Branch feel that the success of London Novus has been mainly down to the fact that Novus have their own strong, separate identity within the Branch. At the start of their journey, the two original Branch members attended Novus’ first 2 committee meetings, purely in an advisory and support capacity, and also to direct their considerable flow of ideas! This support provided invaluable, as I was quite new to post and not familiar with the workings of the Institute at that time. We formed a committee very easily, mainly from the PDP candidates that Gill worked with and by myself recruiting new members who attended the Professional Review and also from contact with general membership. Our biggest problem at this time was to familiarise London with Novus, What was it? What was the point of it? Who benefitted from it? We applied to the Resources Committee for extra funding to hold a Consultation Event and also a formal launch night, after all their was no point in us progressing if our wider membership were not interested. We were delighted when they agreed and awarded us additional money ,this showed the Institute were indeed 100% behind us. To date these two events still remain our best attended events, with over 90 people attending the consultation evening and 175 attending the launch night. I appreciate that to Scotland members who successfully hold the biggest Annual Dinner of the regions this seems small numbers, but I can assure you for London this was fantastic numbers for us!
At the Consultation evening (pre-launch) the audience consisted of a variety of members, non member, Personnel Managers and Training Managers from industry and University Lecturers, our Novus Chairman Ayo Allu MCIOB addressed all in attendance on the ideas behind Novus’ conception, what their immediate and long term plans were, we then asked the floor for feedback and we were astounded by the responses and hunger for this initiative. Successfully from that one evening we secured 5 new committee members, 10 new CIOB members and £500.00 sponsorship from two companies in attendance, plus 82 bookings for the official launch night.
Most importantly the Novus’ name was launched!
We have now been in operation for over 2 years and Ayo Allu is completing his term as Chair, Ayo served his last year as Novus Chair as a duel role and also served as Junior Vice Chair at Branch, he has now moved to Junior Vice Chair for 2011. We felt it was very important for the Novus Committee to see a direct feed in to Branch.
My personal experience of Novus’ has been nothing but positive, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the members and also the events that they stage. I truly believe that Novus has played a big part in London consistently increasing their members year on year.
As you know the Novus initiative has now been supported and rolled out across all the regions, and you are probably wondering where to begin and is it really worth it! My answer to the second question is a resounding YES! I think you will be surprised how quickly the initiative snowballs. In answer to the first question, I hope the next paragraph helps!
To hopefully reassure you London launched Novus when nobody knew what it was, Novus meant nothing to anyone; we had no literature or specific Website areas or Facebook pages. I appreciate geographically we can spread the word easily in London (everyone seems to know everybody here!) Where would I begin in Scotland? I think the most important part is to identify 2 or 3 Branch/Centre committee members who believe in Novus and want to pass on their experience, who will support but not interfere with the running of the new committee. You need to identify a potential Chair who you would be confident to run the group. My profile for a Chair would be a recent MCIOB who has approximately 5 years experience working within the industry. Then the hard work begins, rely on your contacts and also your Branch Manager who has considerable contact with general membership, to form a committee, we started off with only 9 committee members. At their first meeting establish a clear set of objectives, our initial objectives were:
· Encourage progression to MCIOB
· Offer Young Professionals networking and support opportunities
· Hold events that were relevant to their level of expertise (we held 4 CPD in our first full year of operation)
· To provide Young Professional with a voice within the Institute
Our objectives now are slightly different – our new Incoming Chair Helen Bainbridge ICIOB has launched her objectives for 2011:
· Formation of a Novus subgroup of full and part time student representatives fro each University in London, with the clear objective to ensure we are offering support with their curriculum – we are looking to hold one CPD event in each University to support the students
· Increase the number of Site visits especially for our Students, to try and bridge the gap between study and the work place
· To significantly reduce the number of students we lose at the end of their free membership
What is a Young Professional? I am often asked, What is the difference between a Novus Committee member and a Branch member. This definition is mine and is not a working recommendation from the CIOB. But it works in London! A Novus member has typically worked within the industry between 1 – 6 years. We do have student members on the committee but not in Office Bearers roles. All Office Bearers will be ICIOB, ACIOB or MCIOB, and all (actively) working towards their Professional Review. We have a range of grades and experience on our committee and in my opinion the more varied the grades and experience the better! The other question I am regularly asked is how are your Novus events different, don’t they take members away from the Branch events? This I will be honest with you, caused us problems at the start as the same people seemed to come to any event! Not what we were hoping for! So we asked! We contacted all of our younger members what do they want from a CPD event, what topics do they want us to cover, the response was amazing! To this day this is still what we do. Pretty much our Novus events are set by our members and we just go off and do the work! One common denominator is they did not want to be lectured at! So we minimise the presentation time to 25 minutes and the majority of the event is made up of an interactive Q&A session, we also provide time at the end of the event for networking with the committee and the speaker. Joint events are also very popular with Novus and we work quite closely with RICS matrics London. This year we have also trialled panel events which have been very popular and lead to very informative debates.
As you can probably tell from this open letter, I am very passionate about Novus. But, I like to present a balanced argument so I will tell you the negative sides now. THERE ARE NONE! For Branches with Centres I would think your biggest battle would be how you fit this in to your structure. I am afraid I cannot help with this as I have no experience, but in my uneducated opinion I would look to set this up in a main city, just because spreading the word maybe easier.
Once you are established Novus will operate I presume how we do with their own BP and with the Chair and 1 Novus committee member attending Branch meetings to liaise with Branch and to keep them informed of their activities. This works in London but you may wish to operate differently.
I really hope this letter has helped you, and I would be more than happy to speak to anyone over the phone to provide assistance where I can.
I wish the Scotland Branch the very best of luck with Novus and I am certain you will be very successful!
Kind regards
Danielle Baker
Branch Manager – London