In his latest blog, IEMA chief executive Tim Balcon considers how the Institute's central business of providing membership, development and support for environment and sustainability professionals remains as important as ever in its planned future growth through Vision 2020.
Balcon explains how, despite significant changes and new additions to the IEMA group, ensuring members have access to training, networking and recognition opportunities will continue to be at the heart of any growth activities. Here is an extract from the blog:
We have set ourselves some ambitious targets through Vision 2020 – namely around sustainability, membership growth and global influence – and, with the support of members, our governance groups and our staff, we are equipped and ready to go for it. However, I’m very conscious that, since I stepped into the ‘CEO of IEMA shoes’ in April 2013, I’ve talked a lot about what needs to change and a series of new objectives.
That’s important because most of those things, like the merger with GACSO or the launch of IEMA Sustainability Training Solutions, were sparked by what members said they want or need. But what is equally significant is that we retain much of what IEMA has always been about, what has already made us very successful.
It’s not by accident that IEMA membership grew to 15,000 in little over a decade and managed to remain stable throughout a very gloomy economic period. Our intent to build and empower a profession that will change the world is what resonated with our very earliest members and continues to hold clout in 2014.
We always have been and always will be primarily committed to the learning, development, promotion, recognition and celebration of environment and sustainability professionals. We’re making a clear call that everyone in every role should become armed with environmental sustainability skills and we’ve put the mechanisms in place to make that happen. But environment management, assessment, auditing, leadership and compliance will always be at the very heart of what we do. Environmental skills are crucial to a sustainable economy and it’s our role to ensure that specialists will always be supported to do their
very best work.
The full blog is available at www.lexisurl.com/iema25191
