Overview

Businesses want to recruit technical women and also want graduates with insights and knowledge of leadership skills.

Statistics show that fewer men than women graduates transfer from STEM degrees into relevant employment. This project has been funded by HE STEM South East to:

• tackle the low numbers of women entering STEM employment
• to look at career choices and success of engineering and technology students and the differences between male and female students
• explore opportunities for connecting women students with professionals.

Set to Lead is an innovative project that will bring industry and universities together to develop a new resource for academics delivering leadership and team building courses in engineering and technology.

A series of pilot open days for women students at different employers will be set up.

Video material of inspiring leaders will capture leadership insights and role models talking about their careers and leadership.

Roundtable with industry to discuss employability, leadership insights and skills and training tools to produce an up to date resource on leadership models and materials in use.

Roundtable with academics to learn good practice, capture ideas and innovations.

Sustainability

• UCL will hold an annual leadership forum to discuss leadership in engineering and technology
• The open days will be extended beyond the project and managed through the Women’s Engineering Society as part of its student programme to enable employers and universities to continue to connect technical women across sectors and disciplines.
• The resource material and training programme will continue to be available beyond the project.

Set to Lead is led by UCL and the resource material will be developed with Southampton, Imperial and Surrey Universities. Open days are open access.

The project will have the added benefit of raising awareness in universities of the growing need in industry for less transactional and more of a transformational style of management and leadership, the latter style being associated more often with women. Staff involved in the project will therefore also gain new insights into management and leadership skills.

For further information about the project contact the project lead

Dr Jan Peters
Honorary Lecturer, UCL
info@katalytik.co.uk
0797 4011278

This project is supported by: