Next Gen Autumn update: Steering Group, new Partnerships, Insight, Members and more….

by | Oct 2, 2024 | Good news

A lot has been going on at Next Gen Makers recently, with much of this being brand new, so we decided to pack it all into this handy roundup.

Firstly, we recently launched our new Employer Steering Group, which will serve to guide the future direction of Next Gen Makers.

Consisting of representatives from within our member community of companies, the Steering Group meets quarterly and will serve to facilitate ideas sharing and gain consensus for how our work as a community will evolve.

We’ve also been busy ramping up collaborative strategic partnerships with engineering apprenticeship training providers across England. Our firm belief is that we are stronger together, and by forming mutually beneficial partnerships with training providers we can benefit more employers, their apprentices and the training provider itself as we all work towards a common goal of forging a bright future for engineering.

Our latest educational partnership announcement is MTC Training, who join BMet, Make UK apprenticeships & training, Dudley College and Black Country & Marches IOT in our growing partnership community. More on this to follow in a special announcement very soon.

The ‘why’ behind Next Gen Makers has remained constant during our five-year existence. We exist to help future proof UK engineering by challenging the status quo, innovating to find left field solutions to the cause of the skills shortage, whilst bringing the sector together to collaborate and amplify impact.

Whether facilitating benchmarking and best practice sharing to help our member companies to run more successful apprenticeship schemes, or inspiring the next generation by recognising and shining a light on the best employers for engineering apprenticeships: everything stems from our core purpose and mission.

It is for this reason that we have launched a Freemium level of membership, which includes access to a wealth of insight within 3 Reports: ‘Understanding Gen Z & Gen Alpha’, ‘What Apprentices Want’ and ‘The most common apprenticeship scheme best practices’.

By joining our Freemium membership, companies can access these rich insight reports and receive a fortnightly best practice newsletter. Gaining a greater understanding of this kind of insight will only serve to help companies to better understand what a journey to ‘great’ looks like as an employer of the next generation of engineers.

Our Engineering Apprenticeships: Excellent Employer school platform serves to better enable teachers and careers leaders to inform and inspire regarding the opportunities in engineering careers, and signposting relevant students to the best employers in their area for engineering apprenticeships. Since its’ launch in late 2023, it has been met with a hugely positive response from schools and colleges. We’ve been busy with expanding the platform, to include Webinars featuring our member companies, their apprentices and their success stories. As well as making the platform more dynamic, this will create additional opportunities for our member companies to engage and inspire the next generation, telling their stories.

In another first, our Engineering Skills Conference is going national. 160 (free) tickets sold out in September for the event on 30th October in Birmingham, which will be a great half day of networking, insight and best practice sharing for all things engineering early careers and apprenticeships.

Continuing the trend of firsts, our Engineering Skills Conference will be followed up by another in person best practice event – our first ever best practice visit: to Festo GB in Northampton in November. Members will get a deep dive into the Gold standard ‘Excellent Employer’ apprenticeship scheme at Festo as well as their grad scheme and member to member networking.

October sees the announcement of our latest cohort of companies to achieve Accreditation for the ‘Engineering Apprenticeships: Employer Accreditation’ backed by our strategic partner and manufacturing organisation Make UK. Keep your eyes peeled for exciting announcements in due course, as we recognise more of the UK’s leading employers for engineering apprenticeships.

Finally, we are delighted to announce that our membership community for the Engineering Apprenticeships: Best Practice Programme and Employer Accreditation continues to grow apace. In recent months we have recently welcomed the likes of Sheffield Forgemasters, Belcan, British Engines and Paragon Tooling, with many more set to follow by the close of the year.

We’ve had some cracking best practice monthly meetups for members in recent months. In September’s, we were fortunate to have Natalie Desty of STEM Returners and Jo Hindle of R&B Switchgear Group providing an update on 2 very different ways to diversify talent pipelines.

The key takeout? There is untapped talent waiting to join or return to industry if employers can adapt and evolve their approach to recruitment to make it more inclusive.

Sessions like these are what the Next Gen Makers best practice community is all about – sharing ideas and strategies for bridging the UK engineering skills gap, connecting with and learning from others, and creating the change we need in our own organisations.

Here’s to the next 3 months of sharing engineering apprenticeship scheme excellence, recognising employers that go the extra mile for young engineers and inspiring the next generation of makers!