Female focus at engineering event

Perhaps unsurprisingly, NECR 2015 was dominated largely by male applicants either looking for their first jobs in engineering, or else engineers looking to make career moves to the likes of BAE Systems and Bentley Motors.

But among Friday’s male-dominated crowd were a handful of budding female engineers looking to gain valuable industry insight and impress recruiters.

Engineering is essential, ethical, explosive and exciting

Chloe Agg, building services engineer

Although some of the day’s presentations were attended by around nine times as many men as women, the ‘Women in Engineering Forum’ told a much different story.

In fact, the figures were relatively similar – except that the Women’s Forum boasted almost five times as many women as men.

Regardless of attendee figures, however, the forum was designed to boost female participation in engineering - as currently only about 6% of engineering employees in the UK are women.

Lucy Ackland, special projects manager at engineering firm Renishaw, opened the forum by calling for more women to consider an engineering apprenticeship – as she did.

Ackland, who specialises in revolutionising 3D printing, is also a science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) ambassador, and won the Women’s Engineering Society Prize in 2014 for her work in 3D printing.

Ackland said that 3D printing is on the cusp of revolutionising manufacturing, while also suggesting it won’t be long until the technology can be “widely used” to print functional organs and tissue.

Like Ackland, the forum’s second speaker Chloe Agg focused on inspiring more women to take up engineering, while breaking down some of the industry’s barriers.

Agg, a building services engineer working for multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy Cundall, spoke about how engineering is “essential, ethical, explosive and exciting”.

Agg claimed that some female students can be put off by engineering as they fear it is a “dirty” profession where they would only ever be considered “unethical” and “one of the boys”.

However, Agg’s presentation dismissed many of the profession’s so-called “barriers” - drawing on her own personal experiences as an engineer.

For Agg, although there may be occasions where as an engineer you will, for example, get dirty – though you’ll be in full personal protective equipment (PPE) while doing any “dirty” work – what you do on a day-to-day basis will benefit the lives of many thousands, if not millions, of people.

The next NECR event is being held from the 27-28^th November at the NEC, Birmingham.