Almost every project we do is undertaken with support of AlphaPlus’ associate community. We’re aware that the strength and depth of the company relies in no small part on our pool of associates – on your expertise, and understanding of how to deliver projects in the complex education world.

We want to ensure that we are offering the appropriate support to our associates, so that we can be confident our network is working as effectively as possible, both for us and you. With this in mind, we recently sent out an anonymous survey, so that we can better understand the experience of being an AlphaPlus associate. In total, we received responses from over a hundred associates, containing detailed and insightful feedback, and we’d like to share the results with you here.

Working on AlphaPlus projects

Out of respondents who have worked with us on a project within the last two years, 90% were either very satisfied or satisfied with

• project management
• work culture
• work compensation
• appreciation of work carried out.

90% also replied that they would be likely or very likely to work with us on another project.

Being an AlphaPlus Associate

We asked you about your thoughts on setting up your associate account and staying in touch with us. You responded that you find it easy to register as an associate, use the database and receive and respond to messages about people and skills required for projects, as seen in the figure below.

More specifically, we also asked you if you keep your associate profile on our database up to date and nearly 70% of you answered yes. The remaining 30% who did not keep their profile up to date said that they did not remember to do so or did not have time.  (We will continue to try and make associate registration quick and easy, while complying with regulations about data privacy).

We would like to use this article as a reminder to all associates to check that your profile has the most up to date CV and contact details. The more accurate and complete your profile is, the higher the chance that we will ask you to work with us on a project. If your profile is not up to date, you may miss out on projects that might require very short turnaround, so please make sure to update it regularly.

Your responses also show that more of you are neutral or prefer not to answer about using the ease of using the Associate Database. If you have any questions about using the database, or are experiencing any technical difficulties, please feel free to email Zak Horrocks at .

Your opinion of AlphaPlus

We wanted to know your thoughts about our company more generally, so we asked you to describe us by selecting words from a list. The three words/phrases most commonly selected were collaborative, committed to improving education, and fair.

Your thoughts and comments

In the last section of the survey, we wanted to give you the chance to share your thoughts on being an AlphaPlus associate in your own words. We asked you about your favourite thing about being an AlphaPlus associate and the most common response were:

• the opportunity to work on innovative projects
• the flexibility of work that we offer
• the networking options we provide with other individuals and companies in the industry
• how helpful and supportive the AlphaPlus team are.

What we can do better

We were especially interested in learning what we could do better. The two most frequent comments were on the frequency of work offered by AlphaPlus, and on communication regarding project wins. We have addressed both of these below.

Frequency of work

Due to the nature of our business providing services to other organisations, we often have little control over the type, size and frequency of the projects we work on. We understand that this is frustrating for you, and in future we will try out best to mitigate this by giving as much warning as possible for future work.  We have put in place new methods to ensure we approach our community of associates as fairly as possible (so that everyone gets a fair chance).  Ultimately the amount of work available to our associates is impacted by the size of the business overall.  We have committed to growth by recruiting additional personnel for business development over the last two years.

Communication

We agree that our communication with you should be more consistent. We recently reviewed our communication channels so from now on feedback on whether bids were successful will be more consistent.

Conclusion

Overall, feedback from the survey was very positive, and we are sincerely happy that you remain satisfied your ongoing relationship with AlphaPlus. Nearly 90% of you said that they would recommend us to a friend or a colleague who was considering registering as an associate, and we were delighted to read all the positive comments you wrote.Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to the survey. If you’d like to discuss this survey or your experience as an associate, please feel free to get in contact with Tom Hooley at . We look forward to working with you in future.