Richard Price, Director of Technology, shares his experience of being on the Learning Network Board
You might have chatted with the Learning Network team at events like World of Learning, Learning Technologies and at our own Connect conference, but did you know that there are a whole team of volunteers working behind the scenes as well? In fact, everyone who works at the Learning Network is a volunteer, giving our spare time to help keep the Network running smoothly and making sure that we continue to connect and support the learning and development community.
The Learning Network Board is elected each autumn by Learning Network members to act as the custodians of the Network. All the Board work in the learning and development industry as suppliers, as freelancers, or in corporate learning departments. Being embedded in the industry means we are all acutely aware of the unique challenges of working in our sector, which means we’re really invested in the success of our members and of our Network!
I’m Richard Price, and I’m the Director of Technology at the Learning Network. In my day job, I work in learning and development for the NHS, supporting domestic training of health workers and global health education projects. I had the privilege of being elected to the Learning Network Board last year. As the membership has grown over the past 12 months, I have overseen, developed, and improved the technology stack for the Network.
Each Board member is elected for a minimum of two years, so I’m not up for election again this year (which is a great relief as I’m not a natural campaigner!) In this blog post I’m going to offer you a peek “behind the curtain” of the Learning Network so you can learn how my year as a Board member has gone, and help you decide if you want to nominate yourself to join our team.
It can sometimes feel very isolating working alone in learning and development and I have always found that the Learning Network offers camaraderie, connection, and community. That’s what motivated me to stand for election to the Board, to give back to the community that has supported my growth and development and to help safeguard the future success of the Network for the next generation of learning professionals. You may remember I said I had “found my tribe” during campaigning, and that is truly the case!
After the initial excitement of being elected to the Learning Network Board in December 2023, the real work started in the new year when the new Board of Directors met for the first time. Unusually, for our normally fully remote Board, this was a physical meeting where we convened in Leeds for the day to start planning what we wanted to achieve over the coming year.
Usually, the Board meet monthly via video conference for an hour to share progress against the objectives that are agreed in January. We also use Slack, Miro and other collaboration tools extensively between the Board meetings to discuss activities and resolve challenges that arise.
At the face-to-face meeting in January 2024, we agreed on two external-facing objectives and one internal-facing objective. The two external objectives were to grow the membership (which we have more than doubled this past year!), and to develop the events that we offer to bring even greater value to members.
The less visible, internal-facing objective was to improve the governance of the Network and to improve the resilience and reliability of our services and systems. If you have been a member for some time, I hope that you will have noticed some significant improvements to the resilience of our digital services over the past year!
As your Board of Directors, we have a duty to safeguard the success of the Learning Network and to support the learning and development community. While I took on the role as Director of Technology for the Learning Network, it quickly became apparent that we all work collaboratively and cover each other’s roles as required depending on capacity and workload, so I have been involved in events, mentoring, industry partnerships, editing the podcast, and everything in-between! We are a close team of volunteers and rely on each other to make sure that the Network continues to thrive and bring value to our members.
So much of the work that goes on by the Learning Network Board is not visible and often it isn’t very glamorous. There was an issue with the events booking system earlier this year, which meant it stopped processing ticket orders. I had to get my hands dirty and look under the hood of our WordPress site to figure out just what was going wrong – hopefully you didn’t even notice, but there was a lot of head-scratching, cursing, and late nights from myself and other members of the Board!
We also performed a server move from a low-cost web hosting service to a more robust, secure, and professional web host service this year. This dramatically improved the resilience, security and speed of the website. It was essential work, and if we did our job correctly, you won’t have noticed any downtime or problems. This kind of work is not unusual for our Board but you won’t hear about it directly, other than through personal blog posts like this.
While there is a lot of flexibility being on the Board, it’s important not to underestimate the amount of time you will need to give as an elected Board member. Some weeks it’s only an hour, other weeks it is evenings, weekends, and even spending time thinking about the Network in the shower!
Taking a peek behind the curtain can sometimes reveal something you don’t want to see. There are challenging days working on the Learning Network Board but there are also lots of fun days and moments of inspiration, self-development and personal growth. I have made friends for life with other members of the Board and have increased my personal network of peers who I trust and can learn from.
On balance, I have loved being part of the Learning Network Board and being able to work with such an inspiring and talented community of learning and development specialists. If you are a member of the Learning Network (membership is only £29/year), consider standing in the forthcoming elections and join myself and my Board colleagues as part of something bigger, that gives back to the community and helps your personal growth.
#FoundMyTribe ❤️
