EuRA | Executive Group - Update by Dominic Tidey - EuRA C.O.O.
EuRA’s Executive Group meets three times a year and the latest meeting took place at the start of November. The Autumn meeting is a particularly busy one as we incorporate the annual update to the EuRA Global Quality Seal. Over two days we met to discuss all aspects of how EuRA works and we follow a pattern of reporting, starting with financial where Tad reports of the health of the associations finances. EuRA is a not for profit so any money we make from the big conference is put back into member services, which over the next 12 months will be the expansion of our online training programme.
We were joined by our Strategic Consultant for Education, Dr Carmelina Lawton Smith who has been working with me on the new MIM+ and online learning platform. We hope to have a whole new syllabus of modules come online next year and we will also be transferring the MIM Fixed Syllabus programme onto our new interactive platform. All of our training will remain free to access to all members and all of their employees. The only time a charge will be levied will be if you want to qualify and take the online assessment to gain your certification. That will be a simple €50 admin fee per module. The first MIM+ module to go live will be “Legal Compliance in the Mobility Industry” by our brilliant Strategic Consultant for Legal services, Gordon Kerr. This module will be live by the end of November and we will let you know on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as well as via bulletins. Please check out our Facebook page and Twitter feed as well as our LInkedIn groups and feed - lots of info is posted regularly!
The second half of day one of our meeting was focussed on the sessions for our Munich Conference in April and our Strategic Consultant for Intellectual Content Peggy Love led this part with me. We had an unprecedented number of session submissions on a range of topics but were only able to choose 12 breakouts and 8 Ignites from over 50 we received. We are so grateful for the time and effort members put into developing the ideas for our sessions and we had some fantastic ideas that we aren’t able to include in the programme. I think you’ll agree when you see the final programme for Munich, that we have the broadest and most relevant content ever.
Friday was EGQS Update Day! This annual review looks at the EGQS Standard in the light of research taken from EGQS holders and auditors. Martina Scharwey our Strategic Consultant for Quality has led the EGQS for the last ten years, keeping the standard relevant and compliant to our industry needs. This year we specifically looked at the impact of GDPR and how the upgrades to the standard that were introduced last year have worked out. Feedback from members with the seal was really positive about the additional compliance needs for GDPR. As a group we always have concerns about the impact that big changes to the standard have for members re-certifying but in the research that Martina did, we were really encouraged to see that overall satisfaction with the seal remains above 95%.
The EuRA Executive Group work for free and give huge amounts of time and creativity to keeping our association relevant to all our members and they are an exceptional group of people. I know they’re my bosses, but they really are a brilliant group and give so much to promote and assist our industry.