Blog: Environmental sustainability is key to inspiring more young people into engineering careers

Earth Day takes place earlier this week (22 April) – an important opportunity for people around the globe to consider how to take action to help fight climate change, end plastic pollution and protect our precious planet. While the cumulative contributions of individuals are undoubtedly vitally important, we also need to make sure that countries have the infrastructure and systems in place to allow an environmentally sustainable society to thrive.

At EngineeringUK, we want to ensure the UK has the engineering and technology workforce needed to design and build an environmentally sustainable society. This is a key theme in our 5 year strategy and is embedded through our work in a number of ways, including playing our part by measuring and reducing our environmental impact.

We aim to inspire more, and more diverse, young people into engineering and technology roles, and especially those that address environmental sustainability, and are now growing our understanding of how to do so. We’ll be sharing our insights as we go on Tomorrow’s Engineers - which provides a breadth of resources and guidance, from EngineeringUK and other organisations, to anyone engaging young people with engineering and technology activities and careers.    

Research shows that young people care about the environment and it is one of their major concerns, but they don’t necessarily link climate change to engineering solutions and therefore, we assume, a career in engineering. They will often learn a lot about the causes and impacts of climate change, but we need to go beyond this. We need to ensure they are supported to make links between sustainability problems and engineering solutions, and then onto engineering and tech careers. One of the key challenges is that there is little focus on environmental sustainability’s connection with engineering in school curriculums. To help overcome this, we recently launched a brand-new ‘Climate Schools Programme’ pilot, in partnership with the Helsington Foundation.

The free programme is designed to help students explore solutions to tackling climate change and discover how engineers and engineering and technology are a key part of this. Teacher-led science, geography and English lessons are on offer which inspire students to explore green engineering careers and tackle climate change head-on. Crucially, the resources bring real-world examples into the classroom of what engineers and technologists are already doing in this field, increasing understanding and, we very much hope, reducing young people’s anxiety about climate change. By providing busy teachers with curriculum-linked resources, knowledge, and the confidence to address this modern issue with students, we hope to spark students interest and raise aspirations for engineering and tech careers.

This is just one example of how we can utilise young people’s interest in environmental sustainability as a way of encouraging more of them to pursue careers in our sector. If you work in the field and are wondering how you might be able to help, a great way to get involved is by becoming a ‘Climate Ambassador’. This is a new initiative led by the University of Reading, UKRI and STEM Learning to mobilise experts within the climate sector and support them to engage with young people and educators. Climate Ambassadors can also help give schools and colleges practical advice on how to cut their carbon footprint, potentially saving money on energy bills which can be hugely impactful in these cash-strapped times. As you might imagine, there are many efficiency as well as carbon savings that schools and colleges can make, but many lack the expertise to do this. So if you think you might be able to help at all please take a look, or pass the opportunity on to someone who can.

You could also consider sharing your own career story by becoming a Neon case study. Having diverse, real-life examples of people doing jobs in these fields helps young people to aspire to these careers themselves. Or, if your organisation is already running a green-themed outreach programme for young people, make sure you list your experience on Neon – so schools can easily find it and sign up.

If we are to successfully secure the diverse workforce needed for engineering and technology to thrive, we need to ensure our outreach efforts sync in with young people’s interests and in a way that will embed and align with their school education. Tapping into environmental sustainability is a no-brainer.

 Dr Hilary Leevers is CEO of EngineeringUK