Thirty engineering students and graduates could win a business leader as a mentor by developing a stand-out idea to solve some of the toughest problems in society. Thirty business leaders have volunteered to become mentors in the biggest mentoring competition for young engineers. This includes leaders from the Carbon Trust; Amazon; INSEAD; Laing O’Rourke, Honeywell Aerospace and RICS.
Engineering students and graduates can compete for a business mentor by entering Mentor30Engineers which is designed to inspire a passion for innovation.
Mentor30Engineers has been set up by Engineers in Business Fellowship, the charity that enables engineers to augment their engineering qualifications and experience with essential business skills. Engineers in Business Fellowship runs the Sainsbury Management Fellows scholarship and annually awards £500,000 in scholarships to study for an MBA at the top international business schools.
SMF President David Falzani MBE said: “Some of the most important issues we face are not just technical challenges, but ones that require the ability to link technologies to an understanding of the market mechanism, business skills and entrepreneurial commercial thinking. Mentor30Engineers gives participants a chance to stretch their fertile minds and create solutions to big challenges in society.”
Entering Mentor30Engineers
The competition is open to UK-based students and graduates from any engineering discipline and undergrads can be at any stage in their degree course.
Entrants select a problem from five topics – NHS, Environment, Social Care, Finance and Corporate Tax – develop and then describe their innovation in an essay. The entry deadline is 28 February 2018.
The judges are looking for originality, feasibility of the ideas and evidence of engineering skills in the ideas. Entrants with the best ideas will win a Sainsbury Management Fellow (SMF) as a mentor. The mentor will provide 30 hours of mentoring, supporting students throughout their degree studies or through the early stages of their career.
The Judges
The judging panel comprises Sainsbury Management Fellows including the president, David Falzani MBE, CEO of Polaris Associates and an honorary professor at Nottingham University Business School; James Raby, SMF Treasurer and a venture capitalist; Cathy Breeze, Director of Communications at SMF and entrepreneur Dr Robin Jones a partner at Endeavit.
Completing the judging panel is Chris Earnshaw OBE FREng, Chairman of the RAEng Steering Committee for SMF who said, “The Mentor30Engineers initiative provides access to an amazing range of expertise and experience from people who have themselves been successful in business. It is also a great example of how those who have benefitted from SMF Awards are able to widen the impact of the scheme by reaching out to the next generation of engineering leaders who have a passion to address some of the major challenges facing society today”.
This competition is now closed.
