ITER NEWSLINE
43
Getting up speed
Shaoqi Wang, Deputy Director General, ITER Administration
Starting with good news, this week we published 80 open positions for ITER, from Assistant Accountant to Coil Designer for the ITER magnet systems. The deadline for the jobs is 30 September, so hopefully we will have suitable candidates on board by the end of the year. To fill these 80 positions as soon as possible is essential for the project's progress.
To make the recruitment procedure most efficient, we are going to recruit someone to take on drafting short lists, preparing the interviews with the candidates and so on. In the meantime we will contract an external company to speed things up. And there is more to come. Depending on the Council's approval, another 80 positions will be announced later this year.
This brings us to another issue that has to be solved now: office space. By the end of September or the beginning of October we hope to be able to move to Joint Work Site II offering office space for 300 people. Francoise Flament, who has just been appointed as my Senior Advisor, and Hiroshi Matsumoto, Head of the Office of the Director General, will be in charge of ensuring that the removal goes smoothly and we are going to hire someone to support our Logistics Team with the set up of the new offices. In the interim, to provide space for the people that are already here, had meeting room 110 has had to turned into an office and we will still need the help of the CEA to find more space.
Support is finally on the way for the contract division headed by Fiona Digby-Grant. This division is severely understaffed and overloaded with work leading in some cases to long and frustating delays. We are currently busy finding suitable candidates for two professional and one support position to improve matters. In addition, we will outsource some of the work to external companies. So, relief is on the horizon.
Finally, we are eager to improve the daily operations within Administration. In the Finance Department, for example, we are currently simplifying and speeding up the procedures for payments and reimbursements. After the implementation of this new procedure, it should take no more than 20 days between receipt and payment of an invoice.
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