A word from the Chair
Kia ora koutou
I hope this newsletter finds you well and nearly at the point you can turn on “out-of-office” and ‘head to the hills’ (and/or beach!).
Whilst major challenges continue to face many people in NZ and around the world, 2023 has been a good year for HFESNZ with momentum building over the year and a determination within HFESNZ to keep it going into 2024 and see what else we can achieve.
The momentum created this year has been through the hard work of our members: from the planning and successful delivery of our conference in Arrowtown, accreditation of our HFE postgraduate course by CIEHF, the PAB and their work on membership changes (amongst everything else), the workforce development project teams working to further embed HFE in NZ, the hard work of our reps on HASANZ duties PLUS the committee members who are working behind the scenes to keep HFESNZ moving ahead.
I wholeheartedly thank you all for your service and wish you and your family a very merry and safe Christmas holidays.
Meri Kirihimete
Stephven
IEA Awards
We recently heard that HFESNZ had been successfully represented in two IEA Award 2023 categories, which were:
IEA/Tsinghua Award for Collaborative Human Factors and Ergonomics Education won by Fiona Trevelyan and Liz Ashby for the HFE postgraduate programme developed as part of the WorkSafe/HASANZ funded Workforce Development Project.
IEA/Kingfar Award for Research in Human Factors / Ergonomics Issues by early career researchers won by Stephven Kolose who completed his PhD in ‘Anthropometry and 3D Body Scanning’ at the School of Sport and Recreation, Faculty of Health & Environmental Sciences AUT in 2021.
There will be acknowledgement of the awards at the IEA Congress, IEA2024, in Jeju, Korea https://www.iea2024.com/
HFESNZ Workforce Development Project - Tranche 2
WorkSafe has signed off on the second phase of the HFESNZ Workforce/HASANZ Workforce Development Project in October 2023. The project ends on 30 June 2024 so it is important that it gets underway asap. Expressions of interest have been sought from HFESNZ members for the below activities with appointments to be made by HASANZ and the WDP Governance Group shortly.
Milestone 1: HFESNZ Professional Development
- Develop PAB and professional membership processes.
- Scholarship: develop and support early career members.
Milestone 2: HFE Education Pathway
- Establish HFE postgraduate education programme.
- Define introductory HFE education.
- Develop resources to increase industry awareness.
- Marketing of HFE education pathway.
Please contact info@hasanz.org.nz if you missed the EOI and would still like to be involved.
HFESNZ Scholarships
As part of the Workforce Deveopment Project (tranche 2), $55k of funding was available for the HASANZ Scholarship Programme – Human Factors/Ergonomics (HFE).
The deadline for application was 10 December 2023 with interviews to take place in January 2024 and recipients to be named in February 2024 in time for enrolment onto Semester 1 courses.
The level of interest in the scholarships has been exciting to see with 20 applications received from applicants working across a range of industries and sectors.
Merry Christmas
We hope this message finds you well and happy in this festive season. We want to wish you a merry Christmas and a wonderful new year!
We also want to thank you for your amazing support in 2023. It was a challenging but exciting year for many of us, but we managed to overcome the difficulties and achieve great things together. We were so glad that we got to have the opportunity to get together in Arrowtown in July for our conference. It was a great success, and we are looking forward to building on this success into 2024.
You are the reason we do what we do, and we are so grateful for all of your support. We hope you enjoy the holidays with your loved ones, and we look forward to seeing you again in 2024!
