Moving to Becta
June 15th, 2009 § 11 Comments
So apparently it is that time of year again and time for me to make another major decision about my professional future that causes sleepless nights. After almost exactly a year at Jiva I have resigned and will be moving to Becta as Head of e-Communications in a little over a month.
I’m sure most (both!) people who read my blog are aware of who Becta are but just in case “Becta is the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning.” They have long been a key partner of JISC and as such I have been pretty familiar with them professionally over the years though I guess I’m going to get to know them a whole lot better now.
I’ve learned an enormous amount this last year at Jiva; working in an agile Scrum team much closer to the developers and designer than ever before has been a real eye opener. As has the experience of working in a very small company as opposed to large-ish semi-government organisations. I also met some great people and think I’m going to be much better at what I do thanks to being here.
The last 18 months has also seen my professional network explode mainly due to the power of Twitter but also my involvement in a couple of barcamp type events and more of a commitment to this blog and contributing elsewhere – this has all been fun and interesting and given me a much clearer idea of where my strengths lay.
In recent months its been obvious to me that the things that interest me most about what we do is being done by people like Steph and Neil or my old team at JISC. Integrating the tools of the social web into traditional communications and engagement work is what I enjoy and I’m not bad at it I think and this is a great opportunity to go to a great organisation who are committed to use these ideas.
So here we go again – another big change. This one comes with the extra stress of needing to live in the Midlands during the week – so if anyone hears of a room to rent in central Birmingham, Coventry or Leamington Spa let me know 
Congratulations and best of luck!
Julius
Congratulations and best of luck in the new job.
Cheers Julius and James – certainly should make things interesting
Congratulations Matt – sounds like a great move! Hope to work with you on some of the projects we’ve got going with Becta at the moment.
You’ll keep blogging, I trust?
Well I certainly intend to continue to blog and Twitter – seems to have been a big part of how I got the job and I enjoy it too much to stop.
Hope we do get to do some work together – used some of your DIUS stuff as examples of what I’d like to do if I got the job during my interview
[...] to some exciting news professionally I’m going to have to take a bit of a break from organising West of Interesting [...]
Look – more than 2 people read your blog
Brilliant – really chuffed for you. Can’t wait to hear about how you are going to use your new powers!
I’m actually a bit unnerved – almost 150 people have read this post today – guess Becta mentions are on a lot of peoples radar!
Kind of interested to find out what I’m going to do as well
Best wishes and congratulations. There’s increasing work between Becta and JISC in the field of Federated Access Management, so I guess digital identity and e-Communications may well bring us some meetings together
I imagine I’ll be popping up in quite a few JISCy meetings and events so I’m sure we’ll bump into each other!
Many congratulations Matt! Ace news indeed, so well done! Hope we get to work together again soon because of this…
Chat soon!