According to a recent announcement, Silverstone race track will gain its own technical college to specialise in engineering.
Set up with Northampton University and a local college, it will be one of 13 UTCs to offer highly technical subjects to teenagers from next year.
For those of us in the highly technical business of electronics this can only be good news. There is, believe it or not, a shortage of the right type of skilled engineers and this is a great new move by the government to up-skill our workforce. This is also great news for us as Silverstone is right on our door step!
There are already two UTCs open in England, one sponsored by heavy plant manufacturers JCB in Staffordshire and the other, The Black Country UTC, in Walsall in the West Midlands. And three more are already in the pipeline.
They offer 14- to 19-year-olds the opportunity to take a full time, technically oriented course of study and are supposed to be very well equipped with modern technical facilities.
They are sponsored by a university and aim to offer clear routes into higher education or further learning in work.
For those of us who work in the very specialised area of Cable Assembly, the skills required at the top end of the industry can not be underestimated. Quite literally there is a big lack in these specific skills and we already have close links to academia fighting the good fight against the popularism of IT as the default choice for most students.
Having worked in both industries, I can say that had I been given the opportunity to take a course in high-end manufacturing I would have taken it.
I am very happy that we are starting to see some very positive moves in getting our young excited about our industry it can only be good for all of us.
