Inspiring young people of today, to be the manufacturers of tomorrow
Be the Business of choice, not the last resort
There are numerous ways to get involved with your local Schools, Colleges and Universities.
Here at Marvelous Manufacturing we can help you get started on your Schools Engagement Journey if time is an issue. We offer a number of options tailored to your budget and requirements.
Find out more hereHowever if you would rather do it yourself here are some ideas you might want to consider.
Having an open day is a great way to showcase your business or even holding a Manufacturing Festival either just for your business or by working with other local manufacturers. Bringing students into your business will showcase what you do, how you do it and the career options you offer.
Or it could be that you can offer work placements/experience either for a week, 45 days for T Levels or even 6 months for University students. Again this is a great way to bring potential new employees into your business.
Projects are another option - particularly if there is an aspect of your business you would like to develop but don't have the resource for - creating a project for College or University students to work on can help develop your business and give students hands on experience.
And of course there are the old favourites - class assemblies, "who am I" sessions, Careers fairs and mock interviews.
However you choose to get involved you can be sure that you are not only showcasing our amazing Manufacturing Industry but also helping to shape our future workforce.
Are you on our map?
A great way to start your engagement journey is to get added to our "Find a Local Manufacturer" map - here you can specify how you would like to get involved and best of all it's FREE to join
To find out how, get in touch
View our map here!Still need convincing?
Here are just a few comments from manufacturers who regularly engage with their local Schools, Colleges and Universities.
Barry Leahey MBE
(Hon.Prof./FloD)
President of Playdale
Our search for talent in the last decade has become progressively harder and we have many schemes running to ensure we are employer of choice but we realised we had to go a step further, we needed to excite our future engineeers and that is when we started to engage with schools.
We started by simply opening our doors and inviting local schools to tour our impressive manufacturing facilities.
We also offer tours of the construction site when the equipment is being installed and not only has this encouraged Schools to buy our equipment we also have scores of children telling us they want to work here when they are older - who wouldn't we sell fun all around the globe.
However if is not just the children that love the experience, our staff get a great deal of satisfaction and several have now got involved in different projects at local schools all as a spin off from that relationship.
One of our values is "making smiles" and working closely with schools certainly delivers this!
Sara Penrose
BEng CEng
Director Sara Penrose Ltd
Building the future management and growth of your business begins within schools.
This is where the decisions are being made by young people on subjects to study and specialise in. There are so many lost opportunities at this point because students are not aware that their ‘interests’ and skills are in demand by industry and can be applied in a job/ career that engages and enables them to reach their full potential.
Often they just go off in the most popular direction, it’s pure chance that eventually leads one or two to your company door, with or without the desired knowledge and experience.
Students are in the position of: They don’t know, what they don’t know. Many students don’t realise the value of the skills they already have.
The most important part of reaching out to school students is in helping them translate what they are learning into real life meaningful application.
Where might they use the science, the maths, the art in your business roles. Help them join the dots.
Presenting in an assembly or having an open day at your company site are perhaps the best ways to inspire.
If you do this right then commitment into other things such as work experience etc. becomes a lot more valuable and desirable to both sides.
Leigh Howarth
Business Development Manager
M-CNC
Our engagment journey began, when we realised how difficult it was becoming to recruit more skilled engineers due to a lack of skill sets within the talent pool.
I attended school and colleges career fairs to raise awareness that #ukmanufacturing is high Tech and no longer a dark and dirty environment to work in.
We soon began to get requests for work experience and college placements, and saw the opportunity as an extended interview, we had time to distingish those that had the attitude to become an engineer.
Work experience provided us with our first apprentice in 2017, school engagment throughout 2018/19 saw another 4 apprentices (2 a year) come to our doors.
Unnfortunately, Covid put paid to any activity for a couple of years, so we went one step further in 2021 and held our fist FOBEM event, (Festival of British Engineering and Manufacturing) where we invited every school and college in the county to come and see a modern machine shop.
With help and support from our suppliers and customers, it soon turned into a mini expo and we had over 350 students through our doors.
Guess what, this year we have not placed one advert for apprentices, instead we were approached by 7 individuals that attended FOBEM and WANTED to choose M-CNC as a place to start their engineering journey.
We now have 4 apprentices starting this year that all CHOSE us as a place they wanted to be.
So in a nutshell, you may not be able to sort your short term staffing issues, but, if you start engaging with schools, educate the educators and parents, it will not take long before you have people queueing for a placement.