Annual review
Read our objectives of diversifying and growing professional membership, increasing member engagement, providing expert leadership, inspiring young people, and developing an awareness of engineering and the Institution.
2012 was a truly exceptional year for us. We delivered new online tools to streamline professional career development, and also launched our Supported Registration Service – a simpler version of our Managed Professional Development Scheme.
Furthermore, our member-led Learned Society event programme continued to provide a diverse range of events and seminars around the UK and internationally.
Diversifying and growing professional membership in the UK and internationally
2012 saw new membership increase by 25%. This is our fourth year of double digit growth in new members making IMechE the top performer among UK professional engineering institutions. Our net paying membership grew a healthy 2% – the first time for many years. At the end of the year, our total membership stood at just over a record 103,000.
Increasing member engagement and value to members and their employers
Our company-based registration schemes are thriving with Blue-Chip employers such as RollsRoyce, Jaguar Land Rover, Siemens, Cummins and Atkins Global. There are 315 Monitored Professional Development Schemes now in place and there was encouraging expansion outside the UK, particularly in the Middle East and Malaysia.
Providing expert leadership to Government, industry and society
We played a leading role in the engineering community in providing advice to governments. On strategic issues such as education, apprenticeships and manufacturing, we collaborated closely with our sister institutions, the Royal Academy of Engineering and Engineering UK to provide collective influential advice to inform policy-making through alliances such as ‘Engineering the Future’. On issues closer to our mechanical engineering heartland, such as High Speed Rail, energy, nuclear and aerospace, we engaged with policy leaders directly.
Inspiring young people about engineering
We set the standard among professional engineering institutions for successful educational outreach. Our tireless volunteers in our Ambassador Network engage
schools in the excitement of engineering with passion and commitment. Thanks to the efforts of individual volunteers and Ambassadors, and through strategic partnerships
with Bloodhound, Primary Engineer, and Formula Student – the biggest event of its kind in the world – we successfully reached out to 50,000 primary, secondary school and university students.
Developing an awareness of engineering and the Institution
Our members’ support for the development of our media profile, and the readiness of the press to trust us as a source of expert opinion, enabled the highest ever recorded levels of media coverage. Our television coverage on sports engineering during the London Olympics, and the promotion of new technologies such as Liquid Air and Petrol from Air, were typical of our innovative work which helped to garner 96 TV and radio broadcasts, 126 national press articles and 1,533 online articles throughout the year.