As the Academy celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2016, it was working hard to address not just a national shortfall of engineering skills, but a diversity deficit too. Under its President Professor Dame Ann Dowling OM DBE FREng FRS, the first woman to take on the role, it worked with partners to expand its diversity and inclusion programmes to ensure the industry could have the pipeline of skills it needed for the future – working to reach future engineers while greatly increasing its work with current engineers across the globe.
Industry and academia
Dame Ann published the Dowling review of business-university research collaborations in 2015, calling on government to break down barriers to collaboration by simplifying access to publicly-funded innovation support. As part of that ecosystem, the Academy’s Enterprise Hub celebrated its fifth anniversary and opened the Taylor Centre within Prince Philip House in London. Thanks to a generous donation from Dr John Taylor OBE FREng, the centre provides meeting and training space for Hub members and a physical forum to encourage new interactions between innovators.
Collaboration with industry remained vital for Academy programmes too, with the expansion of research funding supported by industrial partners. There was also a huge increase in the Academy’s Chairs in Emerging Technologies scheme, which offers long-term support for researchers working in developing technology areas that have potential to deliver economic and social benefit to the UK. At the other end of the innovation timeline, the MacRobert Award celebrated 50 years of recognising commercially successful innovations that have already made an impact on society.
Skills for the future
The Academy began awarding the RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year awards in 2016, to recognise outstanding engineers early in their careers. Meanwhile, it ramped up efforts to generate a skilled pipeline of next-generation talent, publishing landmark research on engineering education and increasing its regional footprint by rolling out the format of its successful London Engineering Project to other areas including Lowestoft, Barrow-in-Furness and the Welsh Valleys – all regions with long histories of engineering but low social mobility at the time.
Efforts to attract and equip the next generation weren’t just confined to the classroom, but went hand-in-hand with increased public engagement. During this period the Academy collaborated on the new Engineer your future exhibition at London’s Science Museum, worked with the Royal Mail to launch a series of stamps celebrating British engineering, and explored the engineering behind Star Wars at New Scientist Live.
As a major partner in the government’s Year of Engineering in 2018, the Academy unveiled a brand new initiative to show young people how varied and exciting engineering careers can be. This is Engineering launched in 2018 with a series of video case studies of real engineers working in industries ranging from sport to fashion, and within its first few years of targeting UK teens on social media had already markedly changed perceptions of the profession.
A national Academy with a global outlook
With an increase in government funding, the Academy significantly increased its international activities to share engineering expertise and create lasting, scalable impact in developing nations. Supported by the Newton Fund, the Leaders in Innovation Fellowships programme was launched in 2015 to build on the success of the UK’s Enterprise Hub – equipping innovators in 17 countries with the entrepreneurial skills needed to scale their work into sustainable businesses. Meanwhile, the Academy established the annual Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, using its networks to deliver nine months of training and support to a cohort of engineers from across sub-Saharan Africa, awarding its first £25,000 prize to Tanzania’s Askwar Hilonga in 2015.
Collaboration was key to the Academy’s international reach, and it used its convening power to host several high-profile events during this period. In 2016, the UK hosted the CAETS convocation on the theme of Engineering a better world, while the Academy hosted its second Global Grand Challenges Summit, with delegations from the US and Chinese engineering academies and representatives of 40 other nations, in 2019.
Policy advice
With growing calls for policy advice on subjects including energy, transport and cybersecurity, which depend on a wide range of engineering expertise, the Academy teamed up with 41 other professional engineering organisations to launch the National Engineering Policy Centre in 2019. In leading the initiative, the Academy aims to marshal the UK’s engineering expertise into a go-to place for policymakers seeking practical advice on national and international challenges.