Design and Technology Association

This is Engineering Day

Published 5th November 2019

This year, The Royal Academy of Engineering launched the This is Engineering campaign to help address the UK’s persistent skills and diversity shortfall. To date, they have had over 36 million views of the campaign films by young people on social media channels. Moreover, the latest survey data tells us that 72% of teens who have seen the films say that they would consider a career in engineering, compared to just 39% before the campaign launched.

This year they continue to make new films to engage young people, but are also setting themselves a new challenge: to change the image of the engineer and engineering among the wider public, and counter the narrow stereotype of engineering as a field dominated by white men in hard hats. Put ‘engineer’ into any online search engine and the results offer a very narrow view of the profession, one that that lacks diversity: in the faces of the people, and in the disciplines of engineering represented.

Please join us to change the image of engineering. There are three ways your organisation can support this ambition:

  1. Sign the image pledge to make engineering more representative of the society it serves

Sign our pledge on behalf of your organisation to make more representative images of engineers and engineering more visible to the public. To offer guidance on how to make good images of engineering more visible online,  a helpful ‘how to’ guide has been created. Please pass this to your communications or website team to implement, and put them in touch with us if they have any questions.

  1. Share your images

Contribute to our new image library of more representative images of engineers and engineering. Our image library, showing over a thousand diverse images covering the full breadth of engineering, will go live This is Engineering Day 6 November. If you would like to contribute, please pass this on to your communications team or a relevant contact in your organisation.  

You’ll find more detail through the link: https://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/other/this-is-engineering-image-library-brief

  1. Participate in This is Engineering Day

Most importantly, we would be delighted if you could support the day itself. Please show the campaign films in your public spaces. Please also share the films with academic staff to show at the start of lectures on the day. You can access the full suite of films through the campaign YouTube channel

You can also download the latest season films through the links below:

 

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