May 13, 2022
Jane Breach from Drax tells us how being a Corporate Member of EngineeringUK supported the delivery of their virtual work experience programme because of Covid-19.
Building strategic partnerships and networks
Part of being a Corporate Member with EngineeringUK includes an invitation to quarterly Business and Industry Panel meetings and working groups. These meetings gave Drax an opportunity to take part in a virtual work experience working group and helped develop The Careers & Enterprise Company virtual work experience microsite. This microsite provides best practice and advice from other employers and organisations to help deliver a successful virtual work experience programme, supported by the Gatsby benchmarks.
Shaping the development of a strategic vision and a focused outreach programme
As a Corporate Member, Drax drew insight from EngineeringUK research, including the women in engineering briefing and social mobility in engineering briefings, these were used to inform thinking and planning for the virtual work experience programmes.
From these briefings, Drax identified goals and objectives for their work experience programmes. A specific outcome of this was Drax signing the Social Mobility Pledge - boosting social mobility for a million people by 2025, as part of its mobilising a million strategy.
EngineeringUK also worked with Drax to help incorporate these insights into their outreach programmes with their school networks. These insights helped develop a framework to establish a sustainable long-term plan to deliver impactful interactions throughout a young person’s academic journey. This also strengthened Drax’s social impact strategy, demonstrating the rationale to their executives raising its profile, and securing buy in.
Creating new careers resources and engineering engagement opportunities
A natural process of building the work experience programme was for Drax to develop career resources. Drax had also been developing educational resources for teachers and young people. The comprehensive application process highlighted a need to further expand educational resources to include more career pathway content.
Find out what Drax learnt from delivering virtual work experience during Covid-19 and how this is being applied post pandemic.
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