Dawn Newman: Careers and the rise of an online community
Dawn Newman, CACHE Alumni Communities Manager
Monday, March 18, 2024
When CACHE Alumni launched in late 2017, the online service aimed to provide early years practitioners with a place to come together online. Seven years later, it now boasts 25,000 members, says its Alumni communities manager.
With a shared set of values, skills, and behaviours, early years practitioners are invested in their qualifications and already feel like a community. I remember people proudly displaying their CACHE pin badge on their work uniform to show their learning.
After starting small, we’ve expanded to involve everyone working in the sectors supported by CACHE, including education, health, and social care. We've embarked on a mission, in line with NCFE’s charitable purpose, to promote and advance learning, irrespective of the qualifications practitioners hold.
Since that initial launch, over 25,000 practitioners have come to trust CACHE Alumni for support with their careers and the community just keeps growing. It's not because we have a giant marketing budget (we don’t!), but because our membership is very vocal in their support of our community.
Word of mouth is easily our most effective tool. Over a quarter of all the emails our members receive are forwarded to at least one other person - and almost 22,000 engage with us at least once a month through our careers service, online resources, or at an event.
Though our membership growth is impressive, and it’s heartening to see the sector take advantage of free online support, to some extent the number of people in our community is a vanity metric - alongside engagement figures and members listening to our POD-CACHE interviews. The bit that matters most is the impact on members’ careers and the way they feel about themselves.
From the sector skills gaps highlighted in NCFE’s Spotlight Report to research showing that early years practitioners feel undervalued and unheard, it’s clear that those choosing to dedicate their lives to this sector need support in navigating their careers. They also need help in reframing their own professional development and personal wellbeing as being beneficial to those they support.
Professionalism requires self-advocacy and autonomy. This can feel uncomfortable for our members who routinely put the needs of others before their own. Yet we all know that effective coregulation requires us to spend time supporting ourselves.
Between the careers service, our programme of online conference events, and the informal CPD available through our podcast and website, CACHE Alumni has supported its members to feel differently about their skills and their careers. A total of 82 per cent feel more equipped to perform their role because of the resources available, while 67 per cent say membership has opened up employment opportunities.
In our latest membership survey, 75% of CACHE Alumni members said that membership had helped them to make the best decisions about their future progression. If that’s not evidence that we’re doing something right, I don’t know what is.
After celebrating our fifth birthday and growing to support so many amazing practitioners, CACHE Alumni is ready for the next phase of its development. We have with plans to increase the availability of networking sessions and online discussion space so all members can benefit.
While we might offer a lot of the same support as a professional body, the big difference is that we’re here to help, not to regulate, the sector.
The pin badges are sadly not a thing anymore, but the sense of fierce pride early years practitioners feel about their sector is something that will never change. It’s our job to ensure they can find progression and a sense of fulfilment and remain in the careers they love.
