Engineers Ireland, as part of its Engineers Week events, has tasked third-level students to come up with ideas on how Ireland can harness its natural advantages and to look to what infrastructure is necessary to attract companies to locate their data centres in the country.
Engineers Week kicked off yesterday and some 500 events will be happening around Ireland in the coming days. On Thursday, for instance, a free event called Secret, Lies and Mathematics will be taking place at Engineers Ireland’s base in Dublin. The maths workshop will be targeted at secondary school students to learn about code breaking and hidden patterns.
As for today’s event, Engineers Ireland teamed up with Mainstream Renewable Power to get engineering students from different colleges around the country thinking about Ireland’s opportunity in the data-centre space.
Students who participated in today’s event hailed from IT Carlow, DIT, IT Blanchardstown, IT Tallaght, Galway-Mayo IT, NUI Galway, NUI Maynooth, Dundalk IT, UCC, CIT, WIT and Athlone IT.
Engineers Ireland will be announcing the winning college next week.
John Power, the director-general of Engineers Ireland, said today that a creative supply of engineers through third and fourth level is pivotal for Ireland.
He said that being a problem solver is ranked as the most important attribute for an engineer, based on the findings of the HRM Recruit Engineering Perspectives report. The full results of this report for the engineering sector will be announced tomorrow.
“Through our CPD-accredited employer scheme, we know that industry needs flexible graduate engineers who have the ability to work in teams solving complex problems. And the likelihood is that today’s student engineers may well be challenged in their future careers with a dilemma that currently does not exist,” said Power.