What can we do to create change now?

On Thursday evening last week, our account manager Charlotte had the pleasure of attending the AVIXA Diversity and Inclusivity in the Audio Visual industry event. hosted by Kevin McLoughlin at The Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street.

Here is her feedback after a highly thought provoking evening...

The conversation of the evening has resonated with me all weekend and really got me thinking about both inclusion & diversity in the workplace and a few things in particular off the back of this.

• I am very fortunate to work for a company with an ethnic diversity and a 22% female workforce, soon to be 27% with our second female wire-person joining us in a few weeks.
• Although we do not have any staff with disabilities, visible to the eye or not, our ground floor disabled toilet wouldn’t be enough in the long-run for an employee and some of the points raised by Simon Minty have been passed on to my colleagues from this.
• AVIXA have a Young AV Professionals council & mentoring program which I will be sharing with my colleagues get involved with

But I think the main thing that has stuck with me is that how as an industry who are crying out for new blood, we’re not doing the best job at portraying this to the world. I’ve been racking my brains on how we can “break down the language in our job advertisements” and as Charlotte Sweeney pointed out, why are we struggling to find new recruits and how can we stop AV as a career dying out.

Jack Laidlaw of Middlesborough College talked about the first Audio Visual Technology BSc in the UK which is an exciting development that will hopefully pave the way for more courses like these.

I could go on and on as I felt that I took so much away from this evening that I would like to share in more detail but I will finish with two quotes that have stuck with me from the key note presentations

“Turning words into actions”

“Don’t just be inspired, actually get out there and do something to make a change”

#AVIXADiversity

Written by Charlotte Oakman, Account Manager Visualization Limited