TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT Big Bang Fair 2025
by EngineeringUK, aims to inspire, inform, and empower young people to consider engineering, technology and other STEM careers. This year, 20,000 young people visited to see engineering and tech careers brought to life, in spheres ranging from the aerospace, rail, and automotive industries to energy and healthcare, among others. Meeting STEM professionals is a great opportunity to better understand what a job entails, how well it pays, and what qualifications are needed. The Big Bang Fair has so much to offer, and features exciting live shows and inspiring career panels, as well as plenty of hands-on activities. At this year’s Fair young people were able to test their driving skills by putting powerful robots through a series of challenges, experience piloting a submarine, and learn how different materials are used in sports and space exploration, and much more.
Plans for 2025 Big Bang
The Big Bang Fair and Competition team are already making plans for 2025, and we are delighted to be welcoming IHEEM as an exhibitor to the Big Bang Floor. IHEEM will also be sponsoring a new special award for the Big Bang Competition – IHEEM’s Innovation in Wellbeing & Healthcare Engineering Award. As Head of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at EngineeringUK, I evaluate our school programmes to ensure that we are reaching and impacting underrepresented groups. The engineering workforce could and should be much more diverse, for example: women make up just
15.7% of the engineering workforce. In contrast, 56.1% of women make up the rest of the UK workforce. There simply aren’t enough girls on pathways into engineering and tech. Entries to GCSE Computing are up,
driven by an increase of 10.3% in the number of girls taking the subject, which is great to see, but there’s more to be done to ensure that more students from all backgrounds take Computing, D&T, and other STEM subjects at the greater levels required if the UK’s need for a skilled workforce to meet Net Zero targets is to be met. Young people need to know what roles are available, that the prospects and pay
are good; indeed often above average in terms of salary because they are in high demand. It’s also important that young people are made aware of the different entry routes in, and that on-the-job apprenticeships are popular in the sector. However, our research in 2022 found that only 55% of school students said they know what engineers do – 64% for tech – and 60% said they did not know what subjects/qualifications they need to become an engineer. Worryingly also, joint research published earlier this year by the Royal Society and EngineeringUK found that just 16% of girls felt engineering was a suitable career for them. STEM outreach is vital for inspiring and preparing the next generation of STEM professionals. It’s essential in helping to shape the knowledge, perceptions, and understanding young people have about the breadth of careers available, and the variety of routes into those careers. We know that, in general, school students who attend one or more STEM careers activity are 3.5 times more likely to know what people working in engineering do, and 3.4 times more likely to consider a career in engineering.
Reaching out to underrepresented groups at The Fair
Back in Autumn 2020, EngineeringUK developed ‘Priority Schools Criteria’ for our programmes in order to reach more young people from groups underrepresented in engineering. Key
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