The University of Nottingham, together with the University of Cambridge, were the first to pledge their support to the Technician Commitment on its launch in May 2017. Our response to the Technician Commitment takes the form of our ‘Vision for Technical Talent’ strategy. This is an action plan that outlines our key activity over a 3 year period. The first of these was published in 2018 and a refreshed version was launched in June 2022.

The Vision for Technical Talent strategy aligns to the four key pillars of the Technician Commitment: Visibility, Recognition, Career Development and Sustainability, and to all seven goals of the University of Nottingham institutional strategy:

• Solving problems and improving lives: through development and delivery of technical skills and expertise to enable education, research and knowledge exchange of the highest quality
• Supporting potential: through recruitment of technical colleagues with the highest potential and a desire to succeed, providing support and professional development opportunities to ensure they achieve their goals, and through the progression of our work to embed equality in our decisions about staff recruitment, reward and progression
• Developing the campus experience: through ensuring high quality environments for practical teaching and technical training
• Cultivating a global mindset: through deepening our global perspective and further evolving our principle of being one university with campuses in three countries, ensuring initiatives to ensure visibility, recognition career development and sustainability for the technical community are inclusive of colleagues based in the UK, Malaysia and China
• Fostering creativity, discovery and experiment: through opportunities that encourage innovation, creativity and experimentation, both in technical colleagues and students and through strategic engagement with scientific and creative industries
• Contributing to Sustainable Development Goals: through ensuring our technical workplaces and practical teaching and research environments are environmentally sustainable, supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through our research and education
• Embedding collaboration in all that we do: through our work to advance and embed the principles of the Technician Commitment across our own institution and within and beyond our sector, working with learned societies, universities, research institutes, students, funders and government to ensure that the technical profession is developed, supported, developed and aspired to