GATE NEWSLETTER – August 2022
Dear Members, Associates and Affiliates of GATE.
Welcome to the GATE newsletter. You haven’t heard from us recently, but we, the Trustees of GATE, have been very busy preparing several initiatives to make your membership of GATE more valuable and useful. All of these efforts have been developed to enable more people to actively engage in the work of GATE and of Transition Engineering.
Please share this news with your friends, colleagues, and networks.
Launching a Brand New My GATE System
We are replacing our home-made online membership system, and My GATE member services, with a shiny new and much more robust platform for membership applications and member services. The new My GATE platform allows us to offer expanded functionality and enhanced member-only content that will provide added value to you (a little more on this below). We expect the new platform to be launched in early September.
The new platform will be accessible from the same GATE home page: www.transitionengineering.org, via the Join Us button.
Existing GATE full Members, Associates and Affiliates will not need to do anything – your previous member information will be carried over. We will contact you with your new login details for My GATE when migration is complete. There you can review and amend your membership information and upgrade your membership level. Note that your existing login credentials for transitionengineering.org will no longer work when we move to the new member system, so watch-out for the email from us with your new details.
For new GATE applicants the new portal will be a lot easier to use than the old one. We will be promoting it as widely as we can, so keep an eye out for news of it going live in the next few weeks.
Become a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Environmentalist via GATE
In the very near future GATE intends to begin awarding two significant professional qualifications: CEng (Chartered Engineer) and CEnv (Chartered Environmentalist). This is part of our drive to deliver additional value, professional recognition and future professional development for GATE Affiliates, Associates and Members.
We have been working closely with the Society of Operations Engineers (SOE) to become part of their Professional Affiliate Scheme. This means GATE will benefit from all the long standing experience and infrastructure of SOE and, excitingly, enable full Members of GATE to register as a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv) (there will be a registration fee for this). These important qualifications are regulated by the Engineering Council and Society for the Environment respectively and provide full GATE Members with addition professional recognition and use the post-nominals MGATE, CEng and/or CEnv as appropriate.
We hope that all necessary requirements will be in place during autumn 2022 and our new membership application system will make these additional professional registrations seamless. We believe this will add great value to GATE Members.
Want to become professionally registered via GATE as soon as we are able?
Then great! When the new membership system goes live in September you can log in to My GATE and let us know if you are interested in gaining CEng or CEnv recognition. We will then email you when we are able to offer these further professional registrations.
Could you be a Volunteer?
Full Member: Assessor Volunteers
The process of applying for full Membership and the post-nominals MGATE requires that applicants are peer-reviewed. This means that existing Members conduct a review of application submissions and an online peer review interview with prospective new Members.
Additionally, when the process of GATE becoming a Professional Affiliate with SOE is complete (see above) we will need to increase our pool of Assessors further, including Members who have either CEng, CEnv or both, to conduct assessments of applicants for these qualifications.
We therefore need to expand our pool of Members who are qualified as Assessors. Could you be an Assessor?
We are inviting existing full Members to join the Assessor training and become Assessors for GATE. We will ask you to join a free one-day online training course, and then to undertake a number of assessments and interviews to suit your available time. The Assessor training, undertaking of assessments and interviews are all conducted online, so there is no requirement for travel. The process of assessing applicants is a valuable experience for assessors and also contributes to your CPD time.
The first Assessor Training will be in late September 2022 with further dates scheduled thereafter. If you would like to join the training please contact info@transitionengineering.org, and confirm that you are a Full Member of GATE by providing your membership number, and whether you are also CEng or CEnv or both.
Volunteering opportunities whatever your GATE membership level
GATE is run entirely by volunteers, and we ask applicants at all levels to contribute to this effort. If you are reading this newsletter as an existing member at any level – Affiliate, Associate or full Member – please consider what time and expertise you could contribute to help GATE support the wide uptake of Transition Engineering.
We especially need people with expertise in the fields of communications and fundraising who can help us widen the reach of GATE as well as members at all levels who want to create local Transition Engineering groups. GATE will be providing resources to help members get going with volunteering, so if you are interested starting one of the first GATE Groups, or if you have any time to offer as a volunteer please contact info@transitionengineering.org and we will be happy to get you going.
GATE AGM – October 2022
As a registered charity GATE hosts a formal AGM once a year. The 2022 AGM will be our 6th and because we are a small charity it is a fairly straightforward meeting. The formal business takes very little time and there are no contentious decisions to make that could entail lengthy debates.
A key function of the AGM is to facilitate the election of Trustees. We currently have 8 Trustees and our constitution allows up to 12, so there are space available. Any level of member can become a Trustee and we encourage the diversity in thinking from people of varied and non-engineering backgrounds. Would you be interested in becoming a Trustee? Then contact us.
All member levels are invited to join the AGM, although only full Members can vote on official business.
We will combine the AGM with our normal monthly Trustee meeting and allow up to 90minutes for the whole session: 1 hour for the AGM + Trustee meeting and 30 minutes dedicated to input from all members under “any other business”.
The exact date for the GATE AGM #6, is being confirmed, but it will be one morning w/c 17th October 2022, 08:00 - 09:30 (BST) by Zoom.
If you would like to contribute to the AGM or are interested in becoming a Trustee please let us know on info@transitionengineering.org.
Best wishes.
Daniel Kenning
Chair of Trustees, GATE