Keep getting everything you can from your membership.
In your membership: content and people
- NEW Digital Twins: Practical steps for implementation
- LAST leadership course of 2025: Place-Based Leadership | Mon-26 to Tue-28-Oct | Birmingham
Challenge your thinking so you can hone your skillset to inspire people and places to be better through effective and lasting change. - JUST ADDED to the events calendar
- Thu-23-Oct | 09:30 to 11:00 | Reorganise to realise: Making LGR work for you and your partners
- Fri-24-Oct | 13:00 to 14:00 | How to be a great mentor
- Wed-29-Oct | 13:00 to 14:00 | The new leadership team: How HR + IT can jointly build your future workforce
- Watch: Key strategies for modernising threat detection
- Listen: Hard data, warm conversations (Ben Bennetts and Darren Rodwell)
- Meet members and collaborate at local meetings
- Did you miss this? Connected Places
Browse your members-only resource hub.
You will need a user account on socitm.net to access member-only resources. Let us know if need any support.
What’s in your membership?
- Accessibility testing with Silktide
- Benchmarking
- Conferences, meetings and webinars
- Courses
- Innovation session/lab with Civiteq
- IT policy audit [Essential+/Enhanced/Executive] from PPS
- Resources
Member-only discounts for
- Place Insight: your own social progress index
- Courses with the IT Management and Leadership Institute, Leadership Through Data, and QA
- Wed-15-Oct | 13:30 to 17:00 | M365 Copilot for Information Managers
- Mon-27 to Fri-31-Oct | 13:30 to 17:00 | M365 Information Architecture
- WeChange.AI Framework for Change
We calculated the £value of your Socitm membership so you don’t have to.
Keep getting all you can from membership: log into your account.
In your membership: Courses
Leadership
| Course | Location | Dates | Training points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Place-based Leadership | Birmingham | Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 October | 4 |
Core skills (on Teams)
| Course | Dates | Time | Training points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Equality, diversity and inclusion | Tuesday 7 October | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
| How to be an effective coach | Thursdays 16 and 30 October | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
| Introduction to emotional intelligence | Tuesday 4 November | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
| Equality, diversity, and inclusion | Wednesday 12 November | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
Digital skills (on Teams)
| Course | Dates | Time | Training points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Change Agent | Thursday 9 and Friday 10 October | 09:00 to 16:30 | 0 |
Registering for training
Read your guide to using training points. Log in for the current number of available points. Don’t have enough or you’ve run out? Let us know.
Things happen. If you can’t make the date of your training course let us know ASAP and we’ll get you onto the next suitable one available. And your training points will transfer with you.Please note: non-attendance without letting us know will mean training points getting deducted from your organisation’s annual total.
In your 2025 membership: benchmarking
Complimentary use of 1 module
Choose from: cost, delivery, performance or user skills.
With all the financial challenges facing the sector, use the cost module this year to baseline your transformation work.
Find out what you can do and how in the Benchmarking Services Help Centre, then claim your module.
In your membership: events
Lunchtime webinars from 13:00 to 14:00
| Wednesday 15 October: Transforming operations with AI: 3 practical use cases Netcall’s Mark Gannon, former CIO with some of the UK’s largest councils, will showcase AI-powered virtual assistants, advanced summarisation tools, and Intelligent Document Processing. |
- Wednesday 22 October | Beyond the £45 Billion: How AI can actually deliver the productivity everyone’s talking about
- Friday 24 October | How to be a great mentor
- Wednesday 29 October | The new leadership team: How HR + IT can jointly build your future workforce
Meetings
- Tuesday 7 October | 13:00 to 14:00 | LGR insights for districts and boroughs
- Wednesday 23 October | 09:30 to 11:00 | Reorganise to realise: Making LGR work for you and your partners
- Wednesday 3 December | 09:30 to 11:00 | Maximising social value in procurement. A practical workshop for public sector buyers
Conference
Sessions and speakers include:
- An opening keynote address from Cardiff Council’s chief exec Paul Orders
- The future of apps and data integration in local government and the NHS with Dylan Roberts, CDIO of Betsi Cadwaladr University Health.
- Embracing serverless to enhance service: Nickki Johns, Head of Digital at the Vale of Glamorgan Council
- Sarah Day from ADSS Cymru will talk about why digital matters for the future sustainability of social care services.
- Neath Port Talbot’s CDO Chris Owen will be chairing a discussion with CDPS, NLAWARP and the WLGA.
- Councillor Dimitri Batrouni from Newport City Council asks, ‘Is Wales doing enough in the data and AI space?’.
Partners’ events and updates
- Mon-6-Oct | 11:00 to 12:30 | C-TAG Virtual Workshop: Securing your email domain
- Tue-7 to Wed-8-Oct | 10:00 to 15:15 | HETT 2025 [London]
- Wed-8-Oct | 14:00 to 15:00 | How Telford & Wrekin became Council of the Year 2025
- Thu-9-Oct | 14:00 to 14:55 | Working with neurodiverse colleagues and customers
- Mon-13 to Fri-17-Oct | AI Week 2025
- Tue-14-Oct | 14:00 to 16:00 | Public sector buyers showcase: AI for eDisclosure and eDiscovery
- Wed-15-Oct | 09:30 to 13:00 | CX and AI Strategy Event 2025 [Leeds]
- Wed-15-Oct | 13:30 to 17:00 | Course: M365 Copilot for Information Managers
- Thu-16-Oct | 10:00 to 11:00 | AI aggregation for codeless intelligent workflow
- Tue-21-Oct | 14:00 to 15:30 | Procurement Act Peer Support Group: The Competitive Flexible Procedure
- Wed-22-Oct | 09:00 to 16:00 | GovTech Show 2025 [Manchester]
VP Alison Lincoln (Blackpool Council) is talking at 12:30 about Rethinking Recruitment in Local Government Digital Services - Mon-3 to Tue-4-Nov | The Future of Localism [St Andrews]
- Wed-5-Nov | 10:00 to 12:00 | Microsoft Innovation and Collaboration Forum
- Fri-7-Nov | 10:00 to 15:00 | AI workshop for councillors: Explore AI and Innovation [Towcester]
Institute Director Sam Smith is one of the speakers/panellists - Wed-12 to Thu-13-Nov | 08:45 to 18:00 | TechShare Pro 2025 [London]
- Tue-18 to Wed-19-Nov | LGPN South [London]
Full of your Socitm community: CEO Nadira Hussain, Emeritus President Mark Lumley (Hounslow), VP Yogita Popat (Barnet), LSE Chair Rehana Ramesh (Hackney) and VP Kevin Taylor (Suffolk) - Mon-24-Nov | 12:00 to 16:00 | AI in Local Government Fair [Cambridge]
AI in Local Government Fair
Mon-24-Nov | 12.00-16.00 | Cambridge
Our colleagues from AI@Cam are hosting a first-of-its-kind “challenge fair” that puts council staff (not researchers) at the centre of the conversation about how AI can improve public services.
It’s bringing together people from Cambridgeshire, Peterborough, and Greater Manchester with university AI researchers. Local government teams will showcase posters outlining challenges where AI could make a difference – from streamlining social care documentation to optimising transport routes to processing planning applications. Find out more and apply to attend.
AI aggregation
Thu-16-Oct | 10:00 to 11:00 | AI aggregation for codeless intelligent workflow
Narrow AI services on their own are powerful; in combination, they can be revolutionary. The session includes a Q&A with Gareth Handley, NDL’s CTO, and you’ll receive their whitepaper, A Comprehensive Overview of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Services in 2025.
Thank you for reading (or scrolling) this far! Just one more thing…
A couple of things I’ve been doing and looking at this week:
- Found this on LinkedIn: i.AI has open sourced their Minute meeting assistant
Explore the code - Really like Graeme Murrell’s list of courses that their University of Huddersfield placement students take as part of their induction. These ones are done through LinkedIn Learning, but it’s a great list (aimed at web development but feels completely relevant for me too as a comms “professional”) and you can always find your own versions on a platform/s of your choosing.
Take care. I hope you can have a great weekend when it arrives.
Best wishes,
Alex.
Photo by Diego Gennaro on Unsplash
