10 years of EAL supporting the Enginuity Skills Awards

On the tenth anniversary of the Enginuity Skills Awards, EAL is proud to mark our continuous support for what has become the most prestigious engineering and manufacturing skills event in the UK, from its inaugural ceremony to today.

Since its inception, the Enginuity Skills Awards has celebrated the brightest and best in UK engineering and manufacturing talent along with the people and organisations championing skills development.  

Al Parkes, Managing Director of EAL, comments: “As the specialist awarding organisation and end-point assessment organisation for engineering and manufacturing, we know that making sure skills development keeps pace with changing needs often requires collaboration to constructively challenge the way things have been done.”

In recent years this has seen EAL sponsor the Skills Champion of the Year Award twice, in 2020 and 2023. We are pleased to see that this year there are now three categories recognising these unsung heroes – SME Employer Skills Champion of the Year, Large Employer Skills Champion of the Year, and Training Partner Skills Champion of the Year, which are sponsored by EAL.

Training Partner Skills Champion of the Year 2024 nominees

Skills Bootcamp Collaboration, East Coast College

This training collaboration focuses on character traits as much as technical skills, resulting in job offers within six weeks for 67% of the first cohort and 43% of the second.

Empowering Excellence & ECS Championing Skilled Workers, ZZEUS Training

Founded to address post-Grenfell challenges faced by workers in the fire system sector, this partnership has delivered significant advancements in providing meaningful certification for the fire safety industry.

Gloucestershire Engineering Training

The partnership opened a training centre in the Forest of Dean to address a local skills gap, resulting in impressive apprentice retention, completion rates and specialised training delivery.

“This collaborative approach is an important part of why we are trusted to ensure that people have the right skills by engineers, private training providers and employers, as well as schools, academies, colleges, universities, sector bodies and governments.

“It’s great to see training providers and employers working in partnership so that learning and skills development supports sustainable engineering and manufacturing growth,” added Parkes.

This year’s shortlist really demonstrates the benefits of training providers and employers working in partnership, so that learning and skills development supports sustainable engineering and manufacturing growth.

Advancements in technology and net zero

Another change that we’ve seen over our time as an Enginuity Skills Awards sponsor is the rapid adoption of advancements in manufacturing, sustainability skills and green technologies by the UK’s emerging engineering talent.

Entrants in the apprentice or student categories are now familiar with technologies that would have only been used by a few research organisations 10 years ago.

Similarly, many of the employers who enter the Awards now benefit from the ‘sustainability first’ mindset of the young people entering their workforce.

It is this pace of change in the engineering and manufacturing sector that makes the Enginuity Skills Awards increasingly important as a high-profile event that shares best practice in skills development.  

The UK needs to have the right skills, recognised to the right standards, at the right time, for our engineering and manufacturing sector and associated industries to prosper.

The fact that Indro Mukerjee, CEO of Innovate UK, is speaking at this year’s Enginuity Skills Awards is testament to this.

Celebrating the sector's achievements

The Enginuity Skills Awards will be held on 5 June 2024 at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole, next to the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) during Smart Manufacturing and Engineering Week.

Leaders from across the engineering and manufacturing sector will gather to see the following awards presented: 

• Training Partner Skills Champion of the Year – sponsored by EAL
• Advanced Level Apprentice of the Year – sponsored by UCAS
• Graduate, Degree or Higher Level Apprentice of the Year – sponsored by Teesside University
• T Level Student of the Year – sponsored by BAE Systems
• The Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Award – sponsored by Rolls-Royce
• SME Employer Skills Champion of the Year – sponsored by Innovate UK
• Large Employer Skills Champion of the Year – sponsored by FANUC
• Best of British Engineering Award – sponsored by Enginuity

Find out more