Helping employers navigate the education landscape

The education landscape and the different routes it provides into engineering and manufacturing can be complex for businesses to understand, especially for SMEs who often have fewer resources. This makes it hard for employers to know the best way to engage with local schools, colleges and universities to benefit their company.

The Education Landscape: A Guide for Employers was developed in partnership with the British Chambers of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industry, the Federation of Small Business, the Institute of Directors, the Careers & Enterprise Company, the Department for Education and Gatsby.

This guide describes the different ways employers can work with schools, colleges, universities, and the benefits of doing so for your business. These include being able to shape the skills being developed in your local area to better meet your needs, gaining new knowledge and skills from students on industry placements, improving the professional development of your current team, contributing to your business’s social responsibility and reputation, and discovering new potential employees.

It also covers the many ways employers can engage with the local education system:

• Contributing to expert employer panels that shape technical education nationally or locally
• Giving a careers talk or providing mentoring
• Helping to design a course or supporting a student project
• Hosting a site visit
• Teaching a masterclass
• Donating equipment or workshop time
• Offering industry placements
• Hiring an apprentice

Outreach efforts not only help you connect with and encourage young people to enter engineering but also have long-term benefits for the industry as a whole. By actively engaging with the younger generation, companies can contribute to the development of a skilled and diverse engineering workforce, fostering innovation, and driving advancements in the field.

As the charity dedicated to finding new ways to help engineering and manufacturing employers close skills gaps, Enginuity provides free interactive resources and games to help companies make their STEM outreach more engaging:

• Enginuity’s award-winning Skills Miner product engages young people with engineering skills through gameplay in Minecraft.
• Our new Enspire City resource allows young people to explore a virtual city split into zones themed around cars, space, vertical farming, and planes; interacting with characters to learn about engineering careers, accessing videos from real-life engineers, and testing their problem-solving skills in engineering themed games. 

The Education Landscape: A Guide for Employers contains information about how technical education is changing to better meet employers’ skills needs – including an explanation of the difference between Apprenticeships, T Levels and Higher Technical Qualifications.

It also features an at-a-glance guide to the education system in England and Wales, and career pathway maps visualising the different routes into an engineering and manufacturing jobs in England, Wales, and Scotland.

If you want to better understand the education landscape, different routes into engineering and manufacturing, and how best to engage with local schools, colleges and universities to benefit your business, please download The Education Landscape: A Guide for Employers.  

Download: A Guide for Employers