Hello all,

We are now well over a year into my minimum two year term and I concede that things are happening now at a reduced pace. Will and I have been able to introduce some meaningful changes with our colleagues across the department and we're beginning to see some real, tangible improvements to our training process. For example, the OBS > S1 waiting list went down in size for the first time in years and with the award of a batch of training places earlier this month, for the first time in a long time, we awarded an en-route training place to someone that waited less than 12 months in the waiting list. Our improvements are having demonstrable improvements for the division - but we're not done. We have lots that we want to do and we think that things can be made more efficient yet.

One of the biggest issues we have and arguably the most obvious is throughput. We've shared some specific numbers before and I do not intend to dive into them in any amount of detail today, but it's hopefully clear to everyone that reads this that we can teach people faster if we have more active mentors. I am also conscious that the availability of people is not only an ATC Training related matter; we rely on the good will of volunteers to control day-to-day, then for events, for mentoring, for the organisation of training and then more widely within VATSIM UK; our operations, tech, community, pilot training and senior leadership teams are all composed of volunteers.

Sometimes, people stop volunteering - and that's OK. Life gets in the way, things change, people fall out of love with the hobby. But sometimes, there's some tangible reason that people can point at and articulate that we could change and in doing so, they might be more inclined to volunteer with us. Transparency works both ways - I have been as transparent as I can with the general membership about what we're doing and why, but I also hope that people can be transparent with me.

To that end, I've prepared two surveys:

• The first is a mentor retention survey. We're hoping that people will fill this in if they've mentored previously, but no longer mentor currently; ideally people who have mentored beyond 6 months ago but within the last two years. I am obviously conscious that if they're no longer actively involved in VATSIM, they may simply not see this message - please, feel free to share the link.
• The second is a member retention survey. People will find many similarities between the two, but they do pose different questions. Again, feel free to share the link if you know of people who might not read this message.

We encourage you to complete only the most appropriate survey and to please complete each survey only once. I don't want to have to faff around removing erroneous responses that have been completed ad nauseum.

There is an option for you to provide your CID, but we recognise that we need to provide people with an option to engage with us anonymously in order to provide feedback. I think that only the DSG have access to these surveys and the responses. To that end, we will not publicise your responses in a way attributable to yourself - we intend to publicise anonymised statistics and I am hoping that the answers to the surveys will either guide the DSG to making informed decisions, or empower us as a division to go and make representations to the region or BoG about things that might need to change. I encourage people to be honest with us - it is not often that we provide a platform for feedback in this way and if the reception is good, we can look to do the same again in the future.

If anyone has any other thoughts, please feel free to either post them here, message me on the forum or DM me on Discord. My door is always open to hear from people, about anything.

Many thanks,
Adam Arkley