In addition to members working as clerical and administrative staff and service officers, Fórsa’s civil service division is home to many highly qualified professional and technical members.

They are employed across the civil service to carry out a myriad of roles in disciplines such as archaeology, engineering, forensic science and meteorology. 

Due to the nature of their work, they are required to hold a specific qualification to be both employed in their role and also to perform their professional and technical duties. Often these members work alone or in small units across the service.

In order to better represent this unique cohort of members and to ensure that issues specific to their grades are raised and addressed at national level within Fórsa, a new committee is being established: the National Professional and Technical Equivalent Grades Committee (NPTC). 

Over the past few months, a steering group has begun the work of setting up this new committee. This work has included analysing the membership of Fórsa to gain a full picture of how many professional and technical members there are, determining where they are located and what their allocated branches are. 

Chair of the committee Andrew Davies is urging members to get in touch with the committee if they have issues to raise. He said: “This committee will consider issues that impact professional and technical members in a unique way, such as, flexi-time, recruitment and retention, and mobility. We know strength in numbers has an impact so this is all about connecting members who face the same issues but perhaps don’t even know that they are part of a larger group with similar issues.”

The new committee will be reaching out to members across the Civil Service to get to know them and the issues which are important to them. If you would like to contact the committee they can be reached by email here.

There’s never been a better time to join a union, and it’s never been easier. Join Fórsa today.