Holly Chetan-Welsh
Thanks so much for making time to talk all things Technician Commitment, Nik! Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your role at UKRI?
Nik Ogryzko
I'm an ex-postdoc, so I used to be in higher education at the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh and I did a lot of the methodological stuff, developing new techniques and technologies. Looking back on it, I was more on the technical side than the researcher side, so I have some personal affinity to the Technician Commitment.
I initially came to UKRI with the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to work on the Technician Commitment and the Researcher Development Concordat for UKRI and I moved into my substantive role as Talent Programme Manager from that .
I've written our Technician Commitment action plan and I'm working with colleagues across UKRI on implementing that across our roles both as a research funder and as an employer - a lot of people don't realize that UKRI directly employs around 2,000 technicians.
Holly
Can you tell me a bit about your UKRI’s journey to becoming a Supporter?
Nik
UKRI was formed in 2018 and we officially signed up as a supporter of the Technician Commitment in February 2020. Conversations about the Technician Commitment had been happening prior to that.
We want to foster an outstanding R&I system in the UK and technicians are a key part of that, including our own workforce. It’s important that we support existing technicians and new technicians coming in to the profession, and recognise the contributions all make. Signing up to the Technician Commitment was a key part of that. Both UKRI and the sector would fall apart if you took technicians out!
Holly
Great, so where are you in the cycle of preparing your action plan, reporting against it, etc?
Nik
We published our action plan in February 2021 and we are due to publish our self-assessment against that plan and an updated three-year plan in January 2023. Our actual plan spanned more than the required two years, so a lot of the stuff that's in our current plan will probably continue in our updated action plan.
Holly
Are there any specific areas that come to mind that are longer-term?
Nik
The thing technicians always talk to us about is career pathways and the career structure. The action we have around that is to understand what that career pathway should look like and what its future needs will be. Things like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will become more common, so we need to make sure that whatever we come up with is forward-looking and we need the evidence base, and to understand why the current structure does or doesn't work. The first stage of that is understanding what a technical career path could be. That involves not just our own work but also other stakeholders in the sector.
Holly
You've started to touch on this already - but from your perspective, what makes the Technician Commitment so important? Why is it necessary?
Nik
The end goal of the Technician Commitment is that it doesn't exist - that it's no longer needed! So that’s where I want to start.
It's partly about how important technicians are to the work we do. Technicians are the infrastructure on which research and innovation runs, but that’s not all they do - they’re also so important in developing new tools, techniques and methodologies.
They’re like the glue that holds the research system together along with a range of other roles which also don't get enough credit, like the research admin, research managers. It's about recognising the great work that those people do.
“They’re like the glue that holds the research system together”
Holly
Can you talk about the impact you're seeing from your activities?
Nik
The Technician Commitment has a really strong community and I feel we've plugged into that and the technical member leads have done some excellent work - the feedback we've got is really good.
We’ve had feedback to say that technicians are now more visible in all our comms; in how our senior leaders talk about our technicians; in the access that our technicians have to senior leaders across UKRI; and in the prominence they are given in various strategies.
A project that's just matured which Research England (one of our nine councils) have funded, the first stage of which was the TALENT Commission. That's given us a good insight into the experiences of technicians in higher education and research and provides us with a lot of data for our work on the career pathway.
Also, when our CEO Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser came to UKRI she created the 101 Jobs That Change The World project, looking at the huge range of roles that contribute to research innovation through mini case studies and videos. They span everything from our chefs at the Antarctic research stations to the science minister. And a lot of these are roles we would want to support with the Technician Commitment, so it's really good to see the range of roles that contribute to research and innovation recognised.
Holly
Can you talk about the value of having an organisation like UKRI as part of the Technician Commitment?
Nik
We're not just an employer and a funder, we are also a policy organisation, so we engage with a lot of other research funders, both the public research funders, like National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and national academies, but also the charity funders and Wellcome Trust. We're able to convene work around technicians and contribute to government strategies, most often for our parent department (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). There's a couple that came out last year that are really relevant for technicians - the Research and Development (R&D) People and Culture Strategy and Innovation strategy.
We are also able to convene our stakeholders internally across our councils and shape that landscape too. We can make use of the experience of our own technical staff to inform our work and use them almost as our expert advisory group to test what we’re hearing from our external community.
Holly
What are you most excited about in relation to the activities around the Technician Commitment and the growing opportunities for technicians?
Nik
I'm looking forward to people being happier and being recognized and supported for the contributions they make, but it’s hard to look forward to it as it’s still some way before we have that across the board! I really want to make a difference to technicians on the ground.
But what has struck me most about the Technician Commitment is how much it's led by the technical community and how much of a buzz and excitement it has. It's not top-down - the technicians and technical staff are leading the work on it, and that’s something I haven't really seen in any other work I've done. And I think that makes it such an exciting and rewarding area to work in.
What has struck me most about the Technician Commitment is how much it's led by the technical community
Holly
Is there any particular UKRI news that you'd want to share with the rest of the Technician Commitment community?
Nik
We're due to publish our next plan in January, so watch this space!
