Happy new year, welcome to 2022 and I hope you are having a great start to the year.  This isn’t a usual podcast episode, but more an update about what we are planning for the coming year. 

Here at the 1202 Podcast HQ we are putting together the programme for season 4 (I try and package our years into seasons to make navigating them easier) and our ambition is to build upon last years efforts and aim to get out a new episode every 2 weeks between the Start of February and Christmas.  The target is 24 episodes, last year we got to 17, so we will see how it all goes.

In listening to your feedback, we are aiming to ensure the episodes hit your player in time for your UK Monday Morning commute.  Therefore, we are aiming to ensure that the Audio is published by 6am GMT, the website should be updated by midday too, there is some administration that is needed after the audio goes live to synchronise the platforms.  Some of that is a bit dependent on day job priorities but should be there most of the time. 

We will also be doing video as much as we can.  Where we don’t get video of the interview itself, we will still publish it to YouTube as an animated version.  Additionally, I am also going to be hitting the back catalogue and visualising previous interviews. 

In terms of the content, we are continuing the interview format in the main, with several interviews planned covering academia and industry and a wide range of subjects from architecture to Cyber, and a range of influential people, with hopefully some international interest too. 

We are also hoping to cover our first event this year with the Ergonomics and Human Factors 2022 conference in Birmingham. – The current plan is to be at the live event at the end of April, where we will be conducting interviews with speakers as well as discussions with those attending.  Stay tuned for more details as we plan that out.  If you have an event you would like covered, then do drop me a line at 1202podcast.com.

I am keen to develop the accessibility of the interviews, so I will be exploring cost efficient ways of developing transcripts of the interviews.  We will be spending time looking at different ways of distributing the material too, therefore we will be experimenting with clips of episodes, and also different social media platforms. 

Don’t forget that on the website, each episode is categorised by its main relevant competence and therefore is a useful resource when logging your continuing professional development activity, or building up your logbook.

We are developing our Merch line, and currently have hoodies up for sale, and these will be joined by T Shirts and Huff, the Ergonomic Dragon.  These will be available on the 1202podcast.com website shortly.

Your support to the podcast is greatly appreciated, and it would mean a lot if you could leave a review where you are listening to us, or watching us.  Tell you’re your friends and colleagues.  I had an initial target of getting 10,000 downloads/listens by within 5 years, thinking this was a huge target, but as we start our 4^th year, we are nearly there already, so at some point there is going to be a 10k celebration – we just don’t know when it will be yet.

As always, I would be very grateful for your feedback on what we are doing and how to make the content more accessible to you, as well as suggestions as to who you would like to hear interviewed, or events we should attend.