Tackling the Skills Crisis Through STEM Outreach Initiatives

As we've discussed throughout this month, there is a systemic underrepresentation of females, and people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, in engineering. Promoting engineering to a wide audience is important to raise the profile of the profession. However, young people entering high school are one of the key players in changing this underrepresentation, as they can help to produce a generational shift in diversity. Encouraging young people to study engineering, and promoting engineering colloquially, are therefore part of a long lead strategy aiming to tackle this issue. As such, events that create a fun interaction with the field early on in life are therefore central to both improving diversity in the field, and to lessen the skills gap.

BP Sunbury

On June 20^th, BP hosted a STEM education day at their ICTB Sunbury campus in support of the UK government’s 2018 year of engineering campaign. The campaign aims to provide thousands of young people with inspiring experiences of engineering to tackle the engineering skills gap and widen the pool of young people who join the profession.ICBT Sunbury, BP’s cornerstone for worldwide business delivery, invited over 100 students from local schools to take part in an interactive STEM education day. While there, students learned about engineering at BP, spoke to enthusiastic staff about their work (including QEPrize Ambassador Ben Money-Coomes), and completed a hands-on challenge set by some of their engineers based on site. Watch the video for more.