JAN/FEB 2022 COURSE RECRUITMENT 

Another successful start to the year! Our team were busy at the beginning of this year with our Jan/Feb recruitment and commencement of programmes. Over 600 new students started with us in this intake. We look forward to helping all our students through the programmes to graduation later in the year. 

Following on from the success of our webinars, we continued to offer weekly webinars focusing on our Jan/Feb intakes this year. Thanks to Ann and Kevin and anyone who helped with support on these weekly initiatives. We have seen a great return on these webinars over the last number of months and are looking forward to continuing these over our coming recruitment cycles. We are always looking for volunteers to host or help with these webinars to mix things up and any suggestions in terms of content, interesting additions etc. are welcome!  

We also held a Virtual Open Day which was a great success. It is amazing how much we can achieve online. 

INNOSKILLS FUTURE DEVELOPMENT UX WORKSHOP

A number of programme managers came together on Wednesday 9^th March to partake in the Innoskills Future Development UX Workshop hosted by Danielle. This interactive workshop is designed to inform further development of Innoskills platform and to ensure our users are always the top priority. (See photos attached). It is hoped to run these again to include additional staff members.

 On the 3rd of March, Anne Jordan was invited to take part in a "Grow your Careers" Event at Medtronic Athlone. Joan Toner also attended the event. 

We have 8 of their employees on our January 2022 Level 6 in Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Operations and Level 6 in Operational excellence programmes. This was a great opportunity to meet them and find out how they are getting on with the course. As expected we received positive feedback from the happy students!

Anne Jordan was also delighted to meet with Magdalena Sobeka, a past student on the Athlone Momentum programme in 2015 who secured employment in Medtronic at this time along with 4 others whom are also still working there. 4 of these students have been promoted to Cell Team Lead roles and are now planning to return back to us in September this year to upskill. What fantastic news!

Overall a very successful event with lots of interest from management & staff  in our new  Process Digitisation programmes. The team are following up with all of these to help determine the best programme for them. 

A lot of happy faces from our students. A super image that brings a new dimension to the online classes. 

We ran an add campaign in the local Cork Independent newspaper in January.  We ran ads for over 3-4 weeks which was a huge help in the January recruitment campaign.

We have successfully started programmes in Cork in January/ February 2022 and the entire Cork team (Donna/ Sonya/ Catriona and Ann) worked tirelessly on recruiting all students and getting new classes settled into their first semester. 

We recruited and started :

Level 6 Pharma/ Level 6 Food/ Level 6 IT/ Level 7 BA in Pharma Business/  Level 8 BA in Pharma Business Operation and Level 8 Food. 


FACE TO FACE GRADUATION

We returned to face to face graduations in Cork for the Griffith programmes. This was a welcome return for both staff and students having had no graduations in person for over 2 years. All the Cork team supported by Orla/ Ian/ Kevin and Finbarr where in attendance. We had 2 ceremonies on Friday 17^th Nov on the Griffith campus where students graduated and where presented with their parchments. This was the first time that we got to meet students in person and was a fantastic and proud moment for our graduates and for members of staff. 

We held a great workshop on Industry 5.0 with our Innopharma / Griffith International students. Some diverse and amazing perspectives from our students. A global perspective on a global opportunity - with people at the centre!! Thanks to everyone for participating!!! 

We have started 2022 off by laying the ground work for a great year! Firstly, Alexandra and Colm have launched their Learner Support Workshop Series, with the help of Nicole, which you can see more details of below. We’ve also launched our new series of CPD sessions for Staff, also detailed below.

Library

Library Sessions 

Library sessions taking in topics such as Academic Integrity, Referencing, Zotero, Finding Information, Information Literacy and more were given to students across our programmes in Griffith College , TU Dublin and Innopharma. These were very well attended and generated great interest from students. A reminder to all lecturers that customised lectures can be given to your classes  - just get in touch at library@innopharmalabs.com and we can discuss what would work best for you and your students. 

Innopharma Online Library   

The online library on Innoskills continues to grow. There is a new section on  finding past exam papers (this was in response to a large number of queries from students) and existing sections such as Finding Websites, Finding Journals, Zotero and Academic Integrity have been revised and expanded. Please get in touch with me if you would like to see additional content and resources in the online library.  

CONUL Conference  

Innopharma Library will present a paper at the CONUL Conference taking place on the 25-26 May. The Consortium of National and University Libraries (CONUL) is the representative body of research libraries in Ireland and Northern Ireland. 

Contact: Colm O’Connor, Librarian, library@innopharmalabs.com

Staff CPD Sessions

Bitesize Sessions

These 30 minutes sessions are designed to give you a concise overview of a specific learning technology function.  These are not full tutorials; rather, they are quick sessions that will help you work confidently with a particular tool.

These are highlighted in yellow on the calendar below. Please click the name of each session to register.

These sessions combine theory and practice; the first part is an introduction to the “Why?”, i.e. “Why would I use this? What are the benefits?”, and the second part is the “How?”, i.e. “How can I use this? What’s best practice with this?”.

Skills for Teaching Online

These are highlighted in blue on the calendar below. Please click the name of each session to register.

Asynchronous CPD Content

On the Teaching Hub, we have a number of newer content pieces available that you can work through in your own time. These include:

-        Teaching & Learning in Higher Education,

-        Universal Design for Learning (Digital Badge),

-        Feedback Strategies,

-        Supervision of Research,

-        Accessibility & Inclusive Practice,

-        and even more.

Innoskills Future Development UX Workshops

We ran two workshops in this “series” that involves groups developing an Innoskills User persona, and mapping out their life, so we can identify areas where we could help improve their experience. There have been two so far, but we are hoping to run some more, so do get in touch if you’d like to be involved!

Contact: Danielle O'Rourke, Learning Technologist, orourked@innopharmalabs.com

In other non-official news, if anyone is interested in joining a wordle league, just for fun, you can join the channel here. We’ll be posting wordle scores, keeping track of who’s doing well (Colm..) & who maybe isn’t doing so well (Danielle…).

Learner Support

Workshop Series 

The second ever Innopharma Education workshop series for learners was launched in early March. With a focus on academic, study skills and career development advice, this series will be delivered by the Learner Support Coordinator, Librarian and Career Hub’s Nicole Bakker! The series consists of nine workshops delivered online on Wednesdays from 6-6.30pm. With over 270 registrants for the first two workshops alone, they are proving to be popular among students. 

Class Rep Feedback Sessions with Ian 

Another spring, another series of class rep feedback sessions with Ian. Current class reps have been invited to small group, online sessions with the president of Innopharma Education. During the sessions, class reps can discuss their experience of the programme in an informal way. Ian also shares his knowledge of the industry and its growth and development for the future.

Self-Paced Orientation Resource for Learners 

Inductions can be overwhelming sometimes, for both staff and learners. For staff, the concern lies with timing and maintaining the audience focus throughout. For learners, there is a lot to take in and information can easily be missed or forgotten. The Self-Paced Orientation Resource was created to go along with the induction and to help in this regard. It is an interactive resource with videos and tutorials, that offers a gentle introduction to Innopharma Education, the virtual learning environment and learner supports. It allows for the programme induction to be a more relaxed and engaging experience for everyone involved. This resource is available in the Learner Hub on Innoskills, under the ‘Getting Set Up’ tab.

Class Rep Training 

Class Rep Training is well under way, with training completed for class reps on TU Dublin and Griffith collaborative programmes as well as the Innopharma developed programmes. Class reps have also been enrolled on the Class Rep Hub, which is an additional support for class reps with information and resources relating to the role.

Cybersecurity Awareness for Learners 

As cybersecurity becomes more and more important in today’s day and age, we want our learners to be well informed. A cybersecurity information resource was created for learners and is available to them in Innoskills as part of the induction resources.  

AHEAD Conference 2022 

The AHEAD conference 2022, titled ‘Safe Haven or Stormy Port’ is taking place fully online this year. As Innopharma is a member of AHEAD, staff have the opportunity to attend for free this year. The conference will take place over one week, from Monday 21^st March to Friday 25^th March and features live presentations and interactive discussions on daily themes. For a full programme of the themes, webinars and speakers, click here to be directed to the AHEAD conference website. 

Contact: Alexandra Anton, Learner Support Co-ordinator, learnersupport@innopharmalabs.com

Danielle O’Rourke – Learning Technologist – orourked@innopharmalabs.com

Alexandra Anton – Learner Support Co-Ordinator – antona@innopharmalabs.com

Innopharma Technology has seen some ‘firsts’ in the development of SmartX Process Digitalisation and Automation Platform. This quarter has seen the:

·       First time making granules on a twin screw extruder

·       First live demo of a twin extruder run by SmartX

·       First process run on the SmartX Fluid Bed System in University of Limerick

We have had a new paper published on enhancing the capabilities of the SmartX system on fluid bed granulation. This paper encompasses several years of research and development. The publication of this paper coincides with the first deployment of SmartX outside of Innopharma Technology.

Authors - Caroline McCormack, Chris O’Callahan, Ian Jones

EYECON2

Check out a great shot of our latest sale of an Eycon2 taken by our technology partner http://www.chansemt.com/ at their factory in Jiangsu province on one of their fluid bed systems prior to install on customer sites. This is one of the first installs of Eycon2 that uses AI algorithm to characterise fluid bed granulator. 

It's great to be attending conferences and tradeshows in person again . On April 6^th we attended the https://www.manufacturingthefuture.ie/  conference in Galway hosted by IBEC. It was a great opportunity to show the breadth of Innopharma offering across the Technology, Education and Technical Services Divisions and meet our Irish Customers.

 We were delighted to attend the CIO & IT Leaders Awards where our 'Lighthouse Partnership in Disruptive Technology' has been shortlisted for Pilot Project of the Year. What a great night and a fantastic achievement! 

TECHNICAL SERVICES UPDATES    

We welcomed a new group of Validation Engineering Interns who are on our 14 week training programme. They are being purpose trained in Cleaning, Equipment and Process Validation whereby they will develop competencies in Technical Report Writing, drafting and writing SOPs, change controls, validation protocols, performing swabbing, developing sampling plans... The list is endless!

Our programme also focuses heavily on soft skills training and interview readiness with 1-2-1 coaching and mentoring throughout the 14 weeks.

We're so looking forward to getting to know you all over the next number of weeks and seeing how you develop.

AND TO GHENADIE BET

"I am an Electronics Engineer graduating with a Bachelor of Applied Electronics [Honours] from Waterford Institute of Technology also graduated from the University of Moldova with Bachelors in Electrical Engineering. Prior to join Innopharma, I worked in the semiconductor industry as a Customer/Field Service Engineer in the Lithography process – IC’s manufacturing, R&D as an Electronic Engineer upgrading of the water analysers - TOC analysers project, Repair Engineer of different types of EF machinery.

Outside of work, I like to deal with repairing of my cars – not always, do some small electronic projects with my son at home, I like traveling to sand and sea destinations, in the past playing table tennis – happy to see a table at Innopharma and welcome to see everyone in the game!

Appreciate the opportunity to join Innopharma and look forward to work with everyone on the team and experience this dynamic industry".