Today is International Women’s Day, a day set up to celebrate the achievements of women around the world and to highlight areas where urgent action is still needed in order to achieve gender equality.
Rolton Group actively promotes a mixed workforce and has a number of measures in place to try to promote personal development for all, and to encourage a wider range of people to join the team, through graduate schemes and modern apprenticeships.
The lack of gender diversity in engineering is a prominent topic in the media, as just 7% of the UK’s engineers are women, which is the lowest figure across Europe. Efforts are being made to actively try to encourage more girls and young women to consider careers in the sector, to nurture talent which would otherwise be lost to other career paths. When asked what they would say to girls and women considering a career in engineering, Roisin Cloake, Project Engineer, said “Don’t keep thinking about the stereotypes; that’s how to break the cycle.” Yvonne Nowak, Graduate Engineer, said that “There is no reason why women shouldn’t wear trousers these days, so there is no reason why they shouldn’t do engineering,” while Victoria Dobbs, Project Engineer, said “Traditional beliefs about engineering didn’t put me off, and never would.”
Rolton Group is an equal opportunities employer and is accredited by Investors in People, and takes pride in the career and personal development opportunities which it offers to both male and female members of the team.
In addition to the graduate schemes, however, Rolton Group has a modern apprenticeship scheme, to enable students to enter the sector who are not able to or do not wish to pursue the traditional path into engineering by attending university straight after A-levels. By promoting alternative routes into an engineering career, Rolton Group hopes to attract talent from a wider range of backgrounds, which may help to promote greater equality in the sector.
Yet Rolton Group does not just focus on supporting engineering roles; it also offers a Business Administration apprenticeship for aspirational college students. Marketing careers are also supported, through the provision of an undergraduate placement year, along with a graduate role which comes with the opportunity to study towards a master’s degree.
Chairman Peter Rolton says:
“Research consistently shows that workplaces are more effective with a balance of genders at every level of the hierarchy, and we have also found this to be the case through our own experience in the business. It is important to have a gender balance, because it allows for problems to be approached and solved in a variety of ways.”
