Outreach professionals will find it easier to inspire more young people from diverse backgrounds to consider engineering as a future career with the launch of two new resources on EngineeringUK’s Tomorrow’s Engineers website. 

The website brings together free advice and guidance, curated from across the engineering community, to support practitioners in providing young people with engineering careers inspiration. ‘Engineering your future’ is a new PowerPoint presentation to inspire 14–19-year-olds to consider a career in engineering and explores engineering sectors that are expected to flourish in the future – from big data and life sciences to agricultural technologies and low carbon economy – and profiles different engineers, skills required and routes into engineering. 

The Tomorrow’s Engineers careers working group brings together education, outreach, careers and marketing specialists from the Institution of Civil Engineers, Institution of Engineering and Technology, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Institute of Physics, Royal Academy of Engineering and UCL Engineering as well as a secondary school teacher. 

The ‘Engineering your future’ presentation can be used by anyone wanting to inspire and inform young people about a career in engineering, such as STEM ambassadors, teachers, and careers advisers and can be adapted to suit the needs of the presenter and audience. 

The second new resource is the ‘measures bank’, an interactive tool to help researchers evaluate and ultimately improve their organisation’s outreach programme. EngineeringUK research officer Jess Di Simone said: “Embedding evaluation in your STEM outreach can be a powerful way to improve how future outreach programmes are delivered. There are over 250 example questions in the measures bank repository, which companies can use as a springboard to assess the success of their programmes.

“The measures bank can offer tools for practitioners to collect evidence towards improving their STEM outreach and contribute towards our understanding of what works in different contexts and for young people of different genders, abilities, ethnicities, or socio-economic backgrounds.”

The measures bank features material from EngineeringUK’s research and evaluation surveys, such as the Engineering Brand Monitor, which is an annual survey of young people, their parents and STEM secondary teachers about their knowledge, perceptions and understanding of STEM and engineering. Questions are organised based on the evaluation target group like young people, parents, and teachers and are grouped in three types of measures - impact, process, and context - and tagged by the topics they intend to measure, for example, careers or demographic information. 

Intended as a living resource, the measures bank will be periodically updated as EngineeringUK evaluates more of its programmes and receives feedback and contributions from the STEM outreach community.

Click here to visit the Tomorrow’s Engineers website.