Goodhew works at Dover Harbour Board, overseeing the organisation’s engineering and IT functions. Coming from an IT background, he joined the company as head of ICT, and was promoted to his current role when the disciplines of ICT, mechanical, electrical, buildings and development projects were brought together in a new directorate approximately four years ago.

“One of the benefits of working at the Port of Dover is that you can go and stand on the cliffs and see almost everything you’re responsible for,” he says.

Goodhew agrees that the merging of the engineering and IT departments made great sense for the organisation, and that there’s always been a great synergy between the teams. Once the departments began to work closer together, he decided it was time to look at enhancing his employees’ professional qualifications.

“That’s one of the reasons why we went for IET,” Goodhew explains. “My mechanical and electrical staff were already predominantly members of the IET, and as the organisation was also expanding into the ICT area it was the obvious choice; to have many of our staff become members of the same professional organisation.”

Looking around at the options available to him, Goodhew noticed that other organisations excelled in specific areas, but those didn’t help the majority of his staff members to upskill. For example by working with the IET he has helped his electricians and fitters improve their qualifications and professional recognition by supporting their work towards achieving EngTech status.

“It gives them more value,” he adds. “Certainly for our senior positions, we’ve made EngTech a requirement for them to reach the top of their salary scale.”

Focusing on the new ICTTech professional registration, Goodhew worked closely with the IET to discuss his needs and goals, and to be sure that ICTTech would fit the bill.

“The IET representative was very approachable, really interested in what we’re trying to do and gave us knowledge and support on the ICT side of things,” he explains. “We’ve found that the ICTTech professional registration fits really well for us, and means that many of our people, even though they may be in different disciplines, can benefit from being in the same institution.

“My ICT staff feel that it’s a nice thing to have and that ICT has, in the past, suffered from not having a generally recognised professional status, unlike most other engineering disciplines,” Goodhew adds.

The team also enjoys other IET member benefits, including receiving the flagship members magazine E&T.

“It has been a very useful title, and it’s pleasing to see how many IT-focused articles the magazine carries,” Goodhew notes.

Although it’s early days, as the ICTTech status is not yet a year old, many of the newly registered staff are looking forward to seeing what kinds of benefits the title will bring them in the future. They are also hoping that at a later date a higher level IT-based professional registration opportunity will become available as the next step up.

Goodhew believes that coming on board to allow some of his staff to become some of the first in the UK to gain the ICTTech registration has been a positive move, and would recommend working with the IET to a variety of organisations.

“I would definitely encourage it where you’ve got the sort of mix of disciplines that we’ve got, small IT departments that are working alongside engineers. Ports are good examples. There’s not a huge amount of what I call ‘traditional IT’ here. We’ve got office systems etc, but there’s a lot more synergies with the automated control systems in the engineering side now. There must be a lot of industries where sectors work together like that, and I think these would do well to work with the IET,” Goodhew concludes.