The ILP’s ‘Strategy 2026’ will be concluding at the end of this year. So, what will come next? ILP Chief Executive Justin Blades outlines where the current thinking is going.
By Justin Blades
The ILP’s ‘Strategy 2026’, as its name suggests, was always envisaged to take us to the end of this year.
In this article, I intend to reflect on where we have come from and what we have achieved and, from there, outline where – I hope and expect – things will be going next for both the Institution and you as ILP members.
Strategy 2026, to recap, was focused on five key streams of work, branded as ‘strategic implementation plans’ (SIPs): our membership development, technical knowledge base, Pathways into Lighting, the Industry Partner Recognition Scheme, and a review of our external stakeholders.
These five streams, to be clear, are listed in their order of priority. In other words, we prioritised those SIPs that the Board and I felt needed addressing most urgently, and then moved on from there.
MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE
To that end, membership development and technical knowledge were the first two SIPs we focused on. Past President Rebecca Hatch stepped in to help, followed by then Past President Elizabeth Thomas taking a lead.
The result, I am pleased to say, is that, on membership and development, we are now seeing record membership upgrades, as Lighting Journal is showing through its regular profiles. We reviewed and revamped the membership grades, the registrations, and the processes, all to gauge whether they were still fit for purpose.
We wanted to be sure they properly defined what a ‘good’ lighting professional is, that we had a fair and robust process that assessed that, and that we properly recognised those who have made the commitment to go through the process.
That work, I am pleased to say, has now, broadly, been done (even if both are something that you can never say are ‘finished’). We have membership bootcamps embedded throughout our regions, the Exterior Lighting Diploma goes from strength to strength (including emphasising the need to complete the Completion Project to fully qualify), we have technical workshops running on a regular basis, and more besides.
For the technical knowledge base, via Emily Bolt and Technical Manager Guy Harding, we now have a steady stream of peer-reviewed technical information and guidance coming through. Again, it was a case of reviewing things – did we have the right processes in place, were we correctly organised, were we looking at the right thing?
We’ve seen a lot of progress made on the development of our technical training courses – on, for example, GN08 – and on our guidance notes, both in terms of refreshing existing GNs and new GNs coming through in the coming months.
As with membership development, it has been about revisiting and refreshing our processes and asking: have we got the right mechanisms in place? Membership development and technical knowledge remain, of course, core organisational priorities but they are no longer ‘change projects’ in terms of the strategy.
To ensure that these two key areas are given the appropriate attention and focus, as members will no doubt recall, we needed to make some governance changes, following a consultation process as we switched to a Board structure where these are now being led by Peter Raynham as Vice President Membership, Qualifications and Registrations and Emily Bolt as Vice President Technical.
PATHWAYS INTO LIGHTING AND IPRS
That now brings me to the next three SIPs. Taking Pathways into Lighting and STEM outreach first, I need to highlight the excellent work done by Past President Perry Hazell in leading on this. How he has managed to find the bandwidth, energy and stamina not only to be President during our centenary year but also drive this project (and feed in on others) has been truly outstanding.
However, for the moment, the scale and complexity of this SIP does mean it remains a work in progress; there is still work to be done which will – as I shall come to – roll over into our new strategy.
It is a similar story with the Industry Partner Recognition Scheme (IPRS), which is being led by Senior President Elect Michala Medcalf. The aim here is to make considerable progress on this between now and the Lighting Live Annual Conference in June. The project team, for example, has done the first iteration of the assessment framework and put together a draft assessment form.
That will now be beta tested, after which we will go back out to the wider corporate members to, again, assess and define what ‘good’ corporate lighting citizenship needs to look like. What is that, how do we assess it, and what would be an effective way to recognise it?
I was very clear from day one that we in the ILP are, of course, not a trade association. We work very closely with the industry’s trade bodies, such as the LIA and HEA – and we want them to succeed – but the space we fill and the function we provide is different. We are a definer, assessor and accreditor of competence and good practice. Therefore, I have always felt that us having ‘Corporate’ and ‘Premier’ ILP members doesn’t quite sit right with that.
At the same time, however, it is very clear that we cannot deliver on our core remit as an Institution without the support and engagement of the organisations that employ our members. We, again, therefore, through this process want to assess what corporate ‘good’ citizenship needs to mean in the context of the lighting industry and how that is reflected and recognised by and within the Institution.
What we’re working towards is having an assessment similar to what happens with individual members but for corporate bodies. In other words, one based on evidence of how they support the profession – via whatever body, not necessarily just the ILP.
To be clear, our thinking at the moment is that corporate membership will continue to be an option in some shape or form, especially as it can be an efficient and relatively straightforward way for organisations to manage and support individual ILP membership among their teams. Whether it will still be called ‘corporate’ membership is still up in the air, but the thinking is that there should still be a mechanism to enable organisations to take out some form of membership for whole teams rather than simply individuals.
However, the IPRS project team is of the opinion that, for any new industry recognition scheme to be successful, we will need to replace Premier membership, albeit through a carefully managed transition process. Premier members will be encouraged to migrate across, although the finer details of this have still be firmed up. Hopefully more, again, can be revealed in Birmingham in June.
The final Strategy 2026 SIP was a review of our external stakeholders – in other words, our relationships with other industry and global bodies, governments, other third sector organisations and so on. In truth, this has been something of a ‘SIP too far’ within the current strategy as this work will predominantly now be transitioned into our next strategy.
NEXT FOUR YEARS
Which rather neatly brings me on to the ‘what next?’ question. We have delivered a significant amount from the previous strategy, and I think we ought to be proud of that as an organisation and as members. But there is still much to do.
The plan is that this new strategy will be unveiled towards the end of this year. It might (probably will) be a four-year rather than a five-year strategy simply to align the cycle more neatly with the end of the decade and start of the next – hence Strategy 2030.
Where we are at the moment – myself and the Board – is we are intending that Pathways into Lighting and the IPRS will be in this next strategy in some shape or form, whether branded specifically as SIPs or not. From there, there will be a range of further ambitions. One will be diversity and inclusion. Despite the YLP having done great work for more than a decade and the WLP the same for the past two years, we need to be making sure – shoring up – our talent pipelines into the profession, industry and Institution.
Therefore, I feel we now need to be explicit in our Strategy 2030 in recognising that, yes we have achieved a lot in this area, but there is still work to be done – as an industry and as an Institution – on diversity, equality and inclusion. It also of course links quite naturally across and into our Pathways into Lighting work. Quite simply, we need more people, we need a diversity of talent, coming into our industry.
If we’re not as welcoming and open as we can possibly be to those who are up for it and have the passion and desire to become competent as lighting professionals, then we are shooting ourselves in the foot. So, expect to see something around that in our Strategy 2030.
CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY AND INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT
The next area of focus – and to an extent, with hindsight, I feel this really ought to have been within Strategy 2026 but we are where we are – is the whole area of sustainability and responding as an industry and profession to climate change.
There is, obviously, a lot of work going on in this area within the industry already – TM66 and Circular Lighting Live to mention just two – not to mention a political debate to this agenda. We have to be brave and strong enough to stand up and say, ‘this is the right thing to do’. Whatever the arguments around net zero, the evidence, at least to me, is quite clear now and more does need to be done.
So, I have made the argument to Board, and I have started that journey of ‘persuasive consultation’ with the wider profession and membership that we need something explicit in Strategy 2030 that spells out what our vision is and how we are going to go about meeting that.
Another area that I hope to be a focus of Strategy 2030 is international engagement. We recognise we have to be careful about how we do this; this is not about us starting a campaign of conquest and trying to get the map coloured in the ILP colours of purple and gold.
But I think there is an argument for us to be asking: are there regions, territories, countries or international organisations that feel they would benefit from embedding our definition, assessment and recognition of good practice in lighting into their part of the world?
That process has already started, to an extent, with our partnership agreement with the LUCI Association – and President James Duffin of course attended its Cities and Lighting Summit in Oulu, Finland, at the end of February, as he highlights elsewhere in this edition.
While there is still a lot of detail to be agreed on this, our policy will of course be about taking a sensible and balanced approach to engaging with international organisations. It will be one, I suspect, that probably echoes the IPRS in that it will likely have a robust assessment framework, need to be financially sustainable and, crucially, be totally transparent so that members can see the benefit.
IMPACT OF AI
Finally, while I’m not yet sure whether there will be the room or capacity to add this as a discrete or standalone SIP within what is after all only a four-year strategy, I do believe we will need to be considering very carefully the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on both our profession and best practice in the coming years.
To me, just as we have a responsibility (not least to future generations) to be thinking and talking about climate change and sustainability, so too do we need to be thinking and talking about AI and machine learning.
There is going to be fundamental change happening – and it is already happening – because of this technology. It is potentially going to be so broad and deep that, if we’re not careful, it is going to have a Tsunami effect on the profession and the industry.
So, we need to be talking about it, whether that be from a technical, operational another perspective. I think it has to figure some-how but whether that’s a separate distinct project or overarching the en-tire 2030 Strategy is still one for debate right now.
On which note, and to conclude, this is all simply what the Board and I are currently thinking, discussing and debating, no more than that.
What is important is what you, as members, think. These plans will be something we look to consult on in a meaningful way in the coming months. So, watch this space for more details on how and when this consultation happens and how you can get involved to have your say. As your voice is what matters most.
Justin Blades is Chief Executive of the ILP
- The Strategy 2026 document can be found on the ILP website at https://theilp.org.uk/about.html
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the March edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full articlre, simply click on the page-turner to your right.
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