Helping to Create The Future Generation

Last Thursday night, I had the honour of co-presenting the awards at the JET Annual Dinner alongside the Jon Egging Trust’s CEO, Emma Egging OBE PhD .

The Jon Egging Trust (JET) was set up in 2012 to help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds secure the bright futures they deserve. Many of the young people supported by JET have faced adverse childhood experiences or are living in areas of multiple deprivation and are disengaging at school and lacking in self-belief and aspiration as a result.

JET strenuously believes that low aspiration does not equate to low ability, and that what these students need is a helping hand to allow them to shine.

Over the last 13 years, JET has supported over 40,000 young people to develop vital social and emotional skills - including leadership, communication and resilience - allowing them to re-engage with learning, improve their grades and maximise their potential.

The magic of JET's work is that their long-term programmes also link students to professional role models and workplaces within the RAF and the aerospace industry, and some of these students have now left school and are embarking on fruitful and satisfying careers in our sector.

Their work has caused me to reflect on how we as an industry attract talent. 

Securing more qualified engineers for our engineering-based businesses is a daily focus  to ensure we are innovating for our customers.

But simply focusing on the well-worn path of STEM and apprentice engagements via the school system, in order to encourage more students into engineering or project management roles, is to ignore the breadth of our industry and the many roles it offers.

It also ignores a huge pool of potential talent out there who could support the important work we do on behalf of our nation.

Innovating is a team sport and doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

So we have started to approach recruitment a little differently. Let me give you an example.

In our recent recruitment activity for our Space business, we explain that ‘you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work in Space’. Perhaps inspired by the apocryphal tale of the janitor telling President John F. Kennedy in 1962 on his first visit to NASA that “I’m helping put a man on the moon”, we know the success of our business and our sector depends on a broad team, and not just one cohort. It’s a fairly simple idea.

As our businesses grow in the UK, a huge diversity of roles requiring a huge diversity of talents, skills and experiences continue open up. And what kid hasn’t grown up dreaming about aiming for the stars?

Maybe by thinking a bit differently about how we attract talent, and who that talent is, we can do what’s right and make some more of those young peoples’ dreams come true.