Annual Review 2009

Read our objectives of broadening and growing membership, strengthening links with membership and membership engagement, intellectual leadership on the four key themes and developing an awareness of engineering.

We are a truly international organisation and we work to address and highlight the challenges which affect global society, thanks to an ever-growing membership of engineers all around the world.

That said, 2009 will be remembered for another global phenomenon, the economic downturn, which has affected many of our members and their companies. Against this difficult background, we have worked tirelessly to support both the membership and the wider engineering community.

Broadening and growing membership

Sustaining the membership is crucial to us, and we have worked hard to keep and develop
members. We elected more than 1,000 Corporate Members in 2009, and received some 5,500 applications for student affiliate membership. There were just over 400 applications for Fellowship: a 68.7% increase over 2008. We also recruited around 450 new members in India, of which about a fifth were from company schemes.

Strengthening links with membership and membership engagement

We now have some 450 volunteers on our Ambassador Scheme, 104 of whom have attained Ambassador Gold. Through the excellent work and support of our volunteers, our influence in engineering education continued through IMechE Greenpower and our flagship student engineering competition, Formula Student. For the first time this was the largest event of its kind in the world series, with 110 teams competing and over 2,000 students from 21 countries represented.

Intellectual leadership on the four key themes

We made the necessary leap forward required to attain thought leadership status on the world stage. A series of highly acclaimed energy, environment and transport theme reports established us as a source of expert opinion on subjects such as energy from waste, low-carbon technology and marine energy. These reports introduced a global audience to our unique concept of MAG: a combined mitigation, adaptation and geo-engineering strategy to address climate change.

Developing an awareness of engineering and the profile of the IMechE

The UK Government and opposition sought our opinions on climate change. Parliamentary breakfast briefings and key theme policy statements ensured that we were consulted not only on climate change, but also on UK transport technology policy; the motorsport and aerospace Industries; and the Scottish Government’s Scotland low-carbon technologies consultation. The reports caught the imagination of the world’s media, leading to unprecedented press coverage for us on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, BBC TV and radio news, all major UK newspapers, and, thanks to online syndication, in media across every continent.