Professional Staff at ACEMS

2019 Professional Development

Throughout 2019, the team met regularly via Zoom to enhance and refine the Centre's operations and met in person on several occasions to further develop their skills.

Staying in touch: using Microsoft Teams and weekly Zoom meetings

The professional staff team stay in touch with each other daily using Microsoft Teams with an assortment of specialised channels.  They also meet online regularly, with all Central and Node staff meeting fortnightly, and Central staff meeting every other week.  These regular meetings contribute to the Centre’s efficient and effective operations by helping the team to be across all major activities in the Centre, share expertise and information, learn about each other’s roles, share challenges and offer ideas and solutions, and build strong and positive working relationships.

ACEMS Professional Staff Team Days

Despite the benefits of modern technology to stay in touch remotely, it can be a challenge having such a large team working across seven locations.  As a result, the Centre’s professional staff always get together in person for at least two ‘team days’, in addition to time spent together during the Annual Retreat.

During 2019, the team got together in June and October.  The main focus of the first team day was new developments in the Centre’s operations, including updates to the reporting system, use of Teams, and plans for the upcoming annual retreat, annual reporting and the Centre’s legacy, as well as all-important social time to get to know each other better.

At the second catch up in October, the team spent nearly three hours discussing mentoring with special guest participant ACEMS Director Peter Taylor.  To support the conversation a series of formal resources such as questionnaires and guides were shared, and the discussion covered different types of mentoring, things to consider when choosing a new mentor, how to approach a potential mentor, and how to make the most of a mentoring relationship once it is established.

After the mentoring session, the team had a Lunch-and-Learn Professional Development Workshop on “Being your Best at Events and Beyond - The Keys to Successful Networking” in anticipation of practising networking skills at the upcoming Victorian ARC Centres and Hubs Staff Workshop and the Centre’s Annual Retreat.  In the afternoon session, the team discussed the ARCs windup questions, considered legacy logistics and administration, and talked about careers post-ACEMS.

Third Annual Victorian ARC Centres and Hubs Staff (VACHS) Workshop

The day after the October catch up, nine members of the professional staff team attended the Third Annual VACHS Workshop, held on October 16 at Monash University’s Parkville campus.

ACEMS Professional Staff at the 3rd VACHS Day (L-R): Tracy Kelly, Tim Macuga, Dr Emily Duane, Rosanna Verde, Dr Anita Ponsaing, Claudia Deasy, Jessie Roberts, Luna Liu and Minh Nguyen

Introduced in 2017, the inaugural VACHS Workshop was proudly co-hosted by ACEMS and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET), with the organisation of the event led by ACEMS and FLEET Chief Operating Officers, Dr Emily Duane and Dr Tich-Lam Nguyen.  The event brings together professional staff teams from predominantly Victorian-based ARC Centres of Excellence, and ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hubs and Training Centres to share best practice and learnings, find efficiencies, and develop future networks among similar roles.

As usual, this latest VACHS Workshop offered a diverse program of interesting and interactive sessions, including:

• Diversity and inclusion: opportunities and challenges in the research context.
• A presentation from the ARC NCGP Major Investments Team who provided an update on the progress of the streamlining activities they have been implementing in 2019. They also touched on advice for upcoming reviews.
• When History Meets Science - Good Communication: a 'best practice' talk that explored topics around working out who you want to reach, what works and what doesn't, and living with imperfection.
• Current challenge points in our Centres and Hubs: an opportunity for functional groups to get together and nominate their current challenges to discuss, followed by
• Sharing solutions to challenges: the functional groups reported back to the room on the solutions they worked on together.

The day concluded with informal networking at a nearby establishment.  The ACEMS team thank Dr Natalie Jones from CBNS and Narelle Tunstall from CFBD for organising such a great event.

ACEMS Annual Retreat

A fortnight later, the team reunited at the Centre’s Annual Retreat in Adelaide. In addition to attending much of the main program, the professional staff team also had their own activities.  This included the follow-on professional development workshop “Networking - Part 2” which included a debrief on how each person was putting into practice the skills and tips learnt at the first session two weeks earlier. The Retreat provides a very special opportunity to get to know ACEMS members that aren’t professional staff, including members from other nodes, and was a great occasion to put into practice some of the networking skills learnt at the ‘team day’ that were initially explored at the VACHS Workshop.

The team joined in the Equity and Diversity Workshop “The Challenge of Perfectionism”. Team members had the option to form small groups for this interactive session but could also participate by joining an ‘academic’ table if they wanted to better understand this interesting topic from an academic perspective as well as share their own experiences with the Centre’s researchers.

There were also many other opportunities to spend time with each other informally and in small groups which team members self-managed.  Overall, everyone had a great time getting to know each other better, finding out about each other’s roles and challenges, talking about issues and solutions, and brainstorming ways the professional staff team could continue to do things better for the Centre and as a team.

To complement informal conversations, the team finished the Retreat with a couple of formal discussions; the first on how to make better use of Teams, and the second about preparing the 2019 Annual Report.  As always, there were great contributions from all team members.

ACEMS Professional Staff at the 2019 Annual Retreat: 
(back row L-R) Luna Liu, Tim Macuga, Rosanna Verde, Ben Hess; (middle row L-R) Tracy Kelly, Zosia Wargocka, Anita Ponsaing, Emily Duane; (front L-R) Jodie Schluter, Claudia Deasy, Minh Nguyen, Jessie Roberts.
New Centre Finance Manager Minh Nguyen, UoA Node Administrator Jodie Schluter and Chief Operating Officer Emily Duane led the administrative efforts to organise both the Centre’s Main Retreat and the Student and ECR Retreat held in Adelaide.

Plans for 2020

As the Centre nears its conclusion in 2021, the professional staff team will continue to focus on mentoring, windup and legacy, as well as gaining more valuable experiences while with ACEMS to assist with planning for future roles.