With my first six months at the PWI under my belt, I must say that it’s certainly gone at highspeed! I apologise for my inability to prevent train related puns rolling off my tongue: I work in marketing; it can’t be helped! From attending the first few days of the PWI Track Diploma, supporting my colleagues at two sold-out PWI Seminars, attending exhibitions, joining Lunch & Learns and Section Meetings, and working on two editions of the Journal, there certainly hasn’t been a moment to slow down and reflect yet. So I want to use my article to share with you all my initial impressions and things I think we need to shout about more, with your help, because the PWI is pretty amazing… even if I do say so myself!
MY BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS IN SIX MONTHS
I’ve been inspired by the vast range of ways that the PWI engage and support their members and how the sense of community is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. From attending our online events, face to face ones and even industry events like Rail Live, it’s been amazing to see how passionate our community are in furthering their professional development and supporting others to do the same.
July saw the launch of the new Marketing Team’s first campaign which was the EngTech Campaign. I want to start by saying thank you to everyone who supported us with this, whether it was sharing your own Professional Registration journey, writing a blog, recording a video and even simply sharing the message with your colleagues. Over a five-week period in July and August you may have seen lots of content surrounding EngTech Professional Registration and this was to increase awareness of the benefits of undertaking this next step in your career. We were pleased to see an increase in the number of members submitting their final EngTech applications; it served as a reminder to get applications that had been started finally finished! As well as having a high number of applications submitted to join our first EngTech Accountability Group. A panel of industry experts within the PWI community assessed the applications and had the difficult job of whittling them down to the final group; initially we had anticipated running a group of six, but we decided to extend this to nine!
The group is now in full swing and meet every other Thursday under the guidance of Paul Ebbutt one of our Professional Development Officers and Liam Allen a long-standing member and advocate for the PWI. Keep up with the progress of the participants on LinkedIn where we will be posting updates about their progress, so you can celebrate their achievements early next year when they submit their EngTech applications.