Engineers Week 2016: inspiring and enticing students into engineering

5 Mar 2016

Engineers Week – Engineers Ireland’s annual event, which aims to spark an enthusiasm for engineering in people of all ages – draws to a close today.

This year’s Engineers Week has been packed full of great events, from hackathons to lectures to LEGO workshops.

Here at Siliconrepublic.com, we spent the week delving more deeply into the world of engineering.

Editor John Kennedy kicked things off with a discussion of the important role engineering plays in our daily lives, and a call for subjects like engineering and tech to be taught in the nation’s schools.

Perhaps if these subjects were taught in schools – perhaps if they were mandatory – the tech industry wouldn’t have such a homogenous veneer. Perhaps there would be more engineers like Ramona Marfievici, who is a computer engineer at Nimbus.

And perhaps there would be less need for infographics like the one we posted this week, which offered ways to close the gender gap in tech.

We also heard from engineers at Asavie and Accenture – a validation software engineer and a technology consultant, respectively – who showed us the incredible variety of roles on offer within the tech sector.

But tech isn’t the only sector in which engineers are prevalent. Hays Recruitment took us through some of the hottest jobs in engineering, from tech roles to roles in mechanical and structural engineering.

We also spoke to Caroline Spillane, director general of Engineers Ireland, who talked about the work her organisation does to create interest in, and create opportunities in, engineering of all kinds.

The tech industry, in particular, is growing exponentially, though, and tech roles are plentiful, so we took a look at some of the top tech employers hiring engineers right now.

Of course, one cannot have qualified engineers without inspired students.

We tried a little inspiration of our own, posting an infographic that showed some of the best projects ever created using the awesome Raspberry Pi.

The world-famous AOL upped the ante, taking students from Mercy Secondary School through a crash course in coding, working with robots, mazes and gaming.

And finally, this week also saw the launch of Engineering in a Box, a programme designed to guide primary school students through an exploration of all kinds of engineering.

For more information on Engineers Week, check out all of our coverage here.

Looking for tech jobs in Ireland? Check out our Featured Employers section for information on companies hiring right now.

Main image via Shutterstock

Kirsty Tobin
By Kirsty Tobin

Kirsty Tobin served as careers editor of Silicon Republic from 2015 up to August 2017. When she was younger, she had a dream where she started and won a fight with a T-Rex, so she’s pretty sure she kicked butt at this, too. Passions include eating all the cake, watching more TV than is healthy and sassy comebacks.

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