Engineering Talent – Autumn/Winter 2019

The road to a successful career can be long with many pitstops along the way. It starts by deciding which course and qualification to do, before choosing the right centre to train at. It must be a place that provides the ability to expand knowledge by giving access to the right information, and then the opportunity to qualify with a reputable body. The road continues with finding appropriate jobs to apply for and then there’s the long application process – and this is before even entering the home straight of getting to the interview stage.

EAL working with Semta Group’s Innovation Lab recognised that this arduous journey was preventing new engineering talent from starting and getting to where they wanted to be. A road with too many turns and obstacles is one that promising people may decide not to take. And these frustrations don’t lie with just the individuals wanting to pursue a career in manufacturing and engineering. Large employers struggle to find the ‘right’ person amongst thousands of applicants, while small and medium- sized organisations often struggle to attract any talent at all. This can lead to promising talent being lost to other sectors before they have even begun to work in AME. On top of all this, training providers tire of students being led down wrong turns, emerging with unreliable and unusable research.

As a sector connector, we set about finding a way to smooth out and connect this disparate and bumpy journey, making it easier and more enjoyable to navigate. After all, learning, training and recruitment are not isolated destinations in and of themselves. They are very much interlinked points of a lifelong journey. As a leader in the engineering and manufacturing space, Semta’s aim was to create a single centralised hub where all three elements could come together. The result is Engineering Talent.

The ambition for this innovation is evident in its name – we want to ‘engineer talent’. We aim to support and harness career development by providing budding engineers with clear pathways to the careers they want, training providers with a tool to assist with learning, and employers with a platform where they can find a wealth of talent to recruit.

For learning and training purposes, the platform already hosts relevant, reliable and trusted learning content from the likes of Learning Lounge, Electude and EAL. Recruitment-wise, it provides a portal where individuals can showcase their skills, knowledge and qualifications, and apply for jobs posted by the companies they want to work for. Employers can use it to select the talent they want to join their teams, and to host their own training material.

New and exciting, Engineering Talent may only be in its infancy, but it is already gaining sector-wide recognition. In October, the platform won Innovation of the Year at the 2019 Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB) Awards. And Semta has big plans for quickly scaling it into a tool that will be indispensable as Industry 4.0 continues to change our world. Marrying engineering expertise and data is at the heart of Industry 4.0, and this is exactly what Engineering