Industry Advisory Board

I wasn’t able to make the last Digital Advisory Board at Newcastle College. I think it was something to do with a hospital visit but that is all behind me now. This week though, I was able to make it. I had said that I would give a lightning talk on CyberNorth and what we were up to at the meeting I missed and so it was carried over to this one just gone. 

These events at its Enterprise Hub are always lively affairs, fueled by hot coffee and bacon sandwiches. There was granola for those that preferred an alternative. Veronica kept us all to time and even gave us some work to do, thinking about the college’s curriculum especially with the continued introduction of T-levels. 

This gave rise to an interesting discussion about how they would work in the WFH environment. The world is changing very quickly and the government struggles to keep up, pushing policies that reflect the way things were rather than where they are now. Still, it’s better to be inside the tent, working with the Department for Education than the alternative

I wasn’t the only speaker. Samuel from Animmersion, gave an intro into the work that they do using animation to help businesses tackle real world problems (IRL). I made sure to swap cards as this is something we may want to explore on another emerging idea I’m working on but more of that some other time.

So, the meeting was great and I look forward to the next one but something else made the trip worthwhile, that was the other people that attended. I got to speak to five or six people I knew and hadn’t had the chance to catch up with. Diary clashes always got in the way yet there they were, in the flesh. This gave me a good idea.

Rather than try and arrange meetings with the inevitable diary problems I am going to try and arrange them around these and similar events. All I need to work out now is how to know, in these GDPR times, who is going to be there. I could always ask.