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On the 9th November a small team of Ocado Engineers headed down to Xtrac Ltd to take part in the Festival of Engineering – a brilliant initiative to inspire secondary school children into engineering.

Seventeen companies were invited, and we each created activities to demonstrate our engineering specialisms, giving the students a flavour of how varied and rewarding an engineering career can be.

The event was hosted by Richard Benyon MP and Kit Malthouse MP (our Andover warehouse is in Mr Malthouse’s constituency), as part of the government’s Year of Engineering 2018. Nearly 400 Year 8 and 9 pupils took part from across 12 local schools.

The feedback – both for the event and the Ocado Engineering activities – was overwhelmingly positive.

One teacher said, “the best organisation there was Ocado because of their groundbreaking tech”, and a pupil commented it was “very cool and educated us about the world”. We were really pleased to see that our activities went down so well, and hopefully we’ve inspired some engineers of the future. Maybe we’ll see them at Ocado Engineering in a few years' time!

Many thanks to our hosts, to the apprentices from Newbury College and Basingstoke College of Technology who acted as assistants, and to Simon Olsen and Gary Hawkes who took part with me as the Ocado Engineering delegation.

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Inspiring teens at the Festival of Engineering