ECF vacancies

[Carl Hibbard]

I have just checked the ECF home page and they are advertising for folk to fill a number of vacancies. Applications to be submitted before 15th December.

I noticed the post of Director for the Chess for schools project is not included in the list? There must be a reason for that ommision.

See here:-

http://www.bcf.org.uk/organisation/meet ... _nov08.htm

6) The Manager of CfS post will be advertised when the Holloid situation has clarified.

It does however say manager and not director...

[John Upham]

Can anyone think of any roles currently "filled" which, on merit, should be advertised?

[Paul Buswell]

I know it's not one of the vacancies this thread relates to, but for the past 3 weeks or so - may well have closed by now - ECF office in Battle has been advertising in the local weeklies for a full time Membership Secretary / Office Assistant.

Posted in case any chess people fancy the commute or the re-locate.

PB

[Matthew Turner]

A full time Membership Secretary - hmm. Hard to believe that dealing with both the members would really take that long

[John Upham]

I believe that one of the new duties anticipated from March / April onwards will be that of Certificate of Merit (CoM) scheme administration. This will require liaising with schools to take orders (which may arrive in the form of a cheque, but hopefully not many) from schools for their pupils to take the CoM examination on-line.

We are implementing a back-end payment system that will allow ECF products (whatever these are) to be sold on-line and payment taken securely via credit & debits cards plus PayPal, WorldPay and the standard payment mechanisms. Despite this, it is likely that many persons will choose not to trust these means and risk a cheque or Postal Order (or even cash if this still exists) getting lost in the postal system. These alternatives will need human intervention to administer.

I'm anticipating that ECF memberships will be offered on-line securely in Q1/2 of 2009. Fingers crossed!

[Matthew Turner]

Impossible to give a sensible response to this I'm afraid. Schools will send a cheque and then take a secure exam on line?? This requires a lot of office hours to administer??
This is an improvent on the Certificate of Excellence which has raised £30,000 for the ECF and takes effectively zero office hours to administer??
Well good luck with that - it all seems to have been perfectly worked through??

[Matthew Turner]

I'm sorry if I am sounding terribly negative. I genuinely support 90% of what John Upham and Andy Martin are trying to achieve, but sometimes the ECF pseudo-logic is just too much to take.

[John Upham]

Matthew,

I'm doing what I have been asked to do.

I did suggest some 2-3 years ago adding an on-line version of CoE but my suggestion was met with little enthusiasm.

I hope that CoM and CoE can co-exist, and, together meet different needs and different end users.

Clearly, an on-line offering is at least a more scalable solution than a paper-based one but, nonetheless, each have their merits.

Hopefully, ECF office intervention will be minimal and I will endeavour to make CoM as stand-alone and robust as I possibly can. I'm sure most schools possess a credit card and would rather use that than write out a cheque. We'll see I suppose.

I'm aware of schools problems with allowing the use of funky firewall ports as I've seen previous on-line projects for schools fail because of firewall problems. I will only be using TCP/IP ports 80 & 443.

J.

[Sean Hewitt]

I know it's not one of the vacancies this thread relates to, but for the past 3 weeks or so - may well have closed by now - ECF office in Battle has been advertising in the local weeklies for a full time Membership Secretary / Office Assistant.
PB

If one does the maths, its obvious that a full time employee is not an efficient way to deal with this. Another example of all the income being used to pay for the revenue collection!

This is the sort of job that could be put out to tender.

[John Upham]

If one does the maths, its obvious that a full time employee is not an efficient way to deal with this. Another example of all the income being used to pay for the revenue collection!

This is the sort of job that could be put out to tender.

If a modern IT back office was in place (maybe the new Manager of IT would contemplate this?) including VPN functionality, then the office could be entirely staffed by homeworkers using modern comms technologies. The cost of the ECF office premises could be zeroed and the amount of output achieved increased. I'm confident that the incoming Manager of IT would be considering this.

The added value from the office staff would then be seen to increase.

[Sean Hewitt]

I agree entirely John. You must have read my posts on the subject from two years ago

[John Upham]

You must have read my posts on the subject from two years ago

No I hadn't so if there are any copyright issues here I will refer them to my legal team...

J.