To mark International Women’s Day we welcomed 30 female students from Castlepollard Community College to join us for a fun and informative event.
The theme for International Women’s Day 2019 was Balance for Better and we took this theme quite literally! We set the ladies a team challenge to construct the highest possible tower using only marshmallows and spaghetti in an effort to give a real life demonstration of some of the skills needed in engineering – planning, designing, creating prototypes and of course try and try again.
At Mergon, we seek to play an active part in improving the 2% average female participation rate in Apprenticeships in Ireland and shared with the students some real life experiences from our colleagues of their path into a career in engineering.
To further this ambition of increasing the participation rates of females in apprenticeships and more broadly in engineering, we have committed to proactively engaging with local mixed and all girl secondary schools to encourage more female students to consider a work placement in engineering as part of their Transition Year and LCVP programme. This programme will offer:
– Hands on experience
– Mentoring from a member of our engineering team
– Career advice from our female engineers
– Advice on options for further education in engineering (Apprenticeships, college courses)
Over the course of the placement we hope to break down some of the barriers which currently discourage some female students from seeing a future for themselves in engineering.