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Leonardo is one of the UK's leading aerospace companies and one of biggest suppliers of defence and security equipment to the UK MOD. Leonardo makes a significant contribution to the UK economy with revenues of £1.9bn, around 45% of which are in export. The company operates from 8 main sites across the UK, employing over 8,000 highly skilled people. Rob Armstrong, VP UK Mechanical Engineering describes the benefits Leonardo draws from their professional partnership with the IMechE.
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Having a diverse population of engineers is essential to all that we do. We need engineers from a whole range of different disciplines, to drive forward our technology, bringing it to full realisation in our range of products and capabilities. Our customers around the globe trust our engineers to anticipate and deliver all of their requirements.
Professional registration is about more than becoming technically brilliant engineers. We need well-rounded professionals, so we look at the full scope of their skills. How good are they at communicating? Can they manage people and budgets? Do they consider sustainability? Do they think about health and safety? Do they reflect on their future progression and that of their teams?
We already work closely with the IMechE, through our accredited professional development scheme and we also get involved in a lot of their events and initiatives, such as the IMechE Apprentice Automation Challenge. IMechE’s range of offerings play a role in providing our engineers with that spark of stimulation that they need to help them stretch their skill-sets.
There is a lot of scope to develop our relationship with the IMechE. The more we can empower engineers to follow through their ideas and inspiration and make those leaps of innovation, the more we enrich our business and our wider industry. We can do this by sharing stories and challenges, coming together as a community of active and dynamic thinkers.
I think the real benefits are that we can demonstrate that we invest in our engineers and their development and that the engineers receive recognition in the form of their formal qualifications, once they reach a certain level of professional competence, whether that is through chartership, accreditation, or technical registration.