IEEE-USA Meet the Candidates (IEEE-USA President and Member at Large)

(Opening Remarks)->

1) IEEE-USA President Elects

Marc Apter: We need to establish an IEEE-USA Sponsored Continuum of Education Program. This is a K-12 program anchored in the pre-college program.

We need to enhance the soft skills and technical skills of young professionals.

IEEE-USA issues->

-Engineer supply
-Older engineers
-Quality if undergraduate education
-Enhancement of status of members of the profession
-Portable pensions in the US
-Employer support of employee's involvement in technical and professional activities

Nita Patel: Manages a team of 30 engineers. IEEE-USA as an organization has challenges that center around communications, declining membership, and relevance to the profession and members. We need to articulate IEEE-USA's vision and we need to understand how our sections interpret this vision. We also need to support people that we corral around our vision and recognize the challenges that they face in promoting change.


2) Member at Large Candidates

Dennis Ray- Undergrad in EE but PHD in Business. Has been involved with congressional contacts and is a member of PES. Wants IEEE-USA to be the trusted source of info and advice.

1) We need to be proactive- workforce is getting older
2) Need to make a big difference in what we do- Make accomplishments known
3) Need to use problem solving skills- there are challenges so we need to be creative in solving them
4) Should not wash the vision out with the bath water
5) We need to fan the flames- support GOLD members

Tom Tierney- Physicist, currently a program manager at Los Alamos, former GOLD chair, vice chair of his section

Change is coming and we need to grow our multimedia offering, ebooks, etc.

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Question: What 3 activities would you champion to increase member value?

Tom: Conferences are our main means to foster new ideas, therefore Virtual conferencing. Youtube and the ability to do real-time streaming. We need to identify the next generation of technologies that will benefit our membership growth.

Dennis: We need to expand the STEP program to capture the GOLD excitement. We need to highlight technology myths as well as relevant policies.


Question: What is your strongest personal trait?

Nita: Being a translator. Able to translate the vision from the top of the organization to the people down below. Able to find the best way to communicate information to your audience.

Marc: Putting teams together. Able to put together a team that can generate the best ideas.


Question: How would the members at large reach out to members?

Dennis: I would not reach out to individual members, I would participate in the board's communication schemes

Tom: Blogs are effective as as having official office hours where members could communicate via videoconferencing.


Question: What policies would you enact to promote our IEEE's 2020 vision?

Marc: I want to add 20,000 new members before 2020. Making more use of technology quicker. Get it out there quickly and make use of it thoroughly.

Nita: We cannot corner ourselves into any one vision. It's not about how many members we have but how we have them engaged.


Question: A significant number of our members have no idea what IEEE-USA is about. How would you address this?

Tom: IEEE-USA has a great webpage and we need to draw more attention to it. IEEE-USA needs to get more involved in the technical conferences, pull out the new technologies, and promote them in new policies.


Question: What can IEEE-USA do to diversify it's sources of revenue?

Nita: Conferences are a great source of revenue but we need to prioritize our ideas and pick the most relevant ones.

Marc: Rather than hold more conferences that concentrate upon traditional ideas, let's look into ideas that have never been tried before.


Question: What do you see as our 1-2 most critical challenges?

Nita: We're losing practitioners because we are not addressing their needs. How do we get them the information that they need to tackle new positions and new jobs?

Dennis: The exodus of so many engineers in such a short period of time is a source of concern. How can we use the volunteer capacity to try and convince them that they can make a difference in helping to meet IEEE-USA's vision?

Tom: We need to draw in new membership but also challenge the current ones.

IEEE-USA Leadership Meet and Greet

The following is a small snippet from the 5-minute introductions given by all the leaders present during the Friday night Meet and Greet->

Jim Jefferies, VP of Government Relations

You can benefit most when you are aware of the government policies in play and their effect on you. There are 100 new members of congress that we have not had any contact with and this a huge priority for our organization. The key to our success is getting the information of the legislature in play out there to everyone and then getting their feedback.

Nita Patel, VP of Communications and Public Relations

Public Awareness- We are good from top down communication but we still need to work on bottom up communication. How can we take your best practices and share them with other members of IEEE-USA?

Gary Blank, VP of Career and Member Services

There are 6 committees involved in the Career and Member Services. Every section should have an active Consultants Network for multiple reasons. Having one means more money for your section and special recognition for your section members that participate in it.

Jim Look, VP of Professional Activities

We lose 80% of our student members in the transition from student members to professional members.We need to figure how to reverse this trend. We have a great opportunity via HKN, the EE honor society, to contact and influence highly qualified engineers so we should work to make this a high priority.

Charles Rubenstein, Region 1 Director

Charles addressed the format of the Annual Meeting->You should have the board available and all of the committees in IEEE-USA available during the weekend to answer your questions. He then asked how many audience members are members of committees and, furthermore, how many are meeting here this week.

Parviz Famouri, Region 2 Director-elect

Some of the challenges facing IEEE-USA is that the US membership is in decline and the life membership has increased, which means that the incoming revenue to IEEE is going to decline even further. Our priority is to ensure that we have a healthy membership in Regions 1-6 by ensuring that our members see the value of IEEE-USA and actively want to stay involved. Studies by IEEE have shown that new members are likely to join if introduced by a colleague. ROMP (Regional Outstanding Meeting Program) was started by Region 2 to highlight the most active sections in IEEE and what they did to achieve success.

David Green, Region 3 Director

We should never downplay the influence that IEEE has on Washington and the issues at large. We are finding that some of our more seasoned members are losing faith in IEEE and the benefits of societal membership. Many of us have been told at 5pm on a Friday that our help is no longer necessary and this is a tough pill to swallow if you do not have a network to support you in your time of need. Region 3 ran a project that identified sections hit hard by layoffs and provided online help to the people affected. IEEE is a network and if all of us work together then we have the ability to help each other and provide help in our times of need.

Jim Reiss, Region 4 Director

Finding and inspiring volunteers is a huge task for IEEE. Region 4 has an issue that it does not inspire it's members when it send outs communications, which is part of a large IEEE/IEEE-USA problem. A telephone call is better than nothing but never underestimate the power of a face-to-face meeting.

Candy Robinson, Region 5 Director

The biggest issue facing our members is that IEEE has lost its relevance (Sections Congress 2008). If we keep doing things the way that we have always done then we're never going to get there. The new ideas come from the sections and it's integral that the leadership start listening to the people on the ground if they want to be relevant to the members. We are doing some wonderful things but we need to start communicating the new tools at our disposal if we want to be relevant.

Ed Perkins, Region 6 Director

We need to figure out how to meet member needs. How can we better dessiminate information about opportunities from the leadership to the membership? Someone once described IEEE as a collection of social networks but we still choose to think of ourselves as a collection of technical networks so we're not figuring out how to engage each other more actively. We need to somehow get this message out that we are actively listening to the members and that we are able to provide them with ample value for their membership.