A group of industrial placement students, O2 engineers and graduates based at our Aycliffe and Atherstone plants have created a digital STEM careers resource for secondary school students.
The video features a diverse team of 3Mers from Aycliffe, including plant manager Paul Hind, senior engineer Lisa Fletcher and senior project engineer Jaipal Sachdev, talking about their own career paths and sharing insights into the wide range of STEM roles available.
Sami Tesfayohannes, Hugh Black, George Sadler, Mai Nguyen, Blair Marynicz, Sam Bryan and Fay Rochester were given the task as a development STEM project in the run up to British Science Week, which ran from 5-14 March.
As well as dispelling some of the myths around nerdy scientists and grimy engineers, the aim of the video was to show how diverse teams are Innovating for the Future – the theme for 2021.
Says Fay: "We really enjoyed the challenge and played to our strengths as a team. When choosing who to interview, we made sure that we featured 3Mers from a range of backgrounds who could demonstrate that there are many different routes into STEM careers.
"We then brainstormed a number of ideas to come up with a storyboard for the video to showcase diversity and innovation and chose the best questions to draw out detailed responses from our interviewees."
George and Hugh filmed the interviews in Paul's office and the team then worked with a professional video company to edit the footage and add special effects.
Says Hugh: "We also incorporated as many disruptive technologies as possible in the video footage - such as HoloLens augmented reality and 3M models - to appeal to 14-15 year-olds."
As the team was working to tight deadlines, project management was key.
Says Blair: "We held regular update meetings using Microsoft Teams and also made sure that all the necessary approvals and Legal checks were in place. We all found working with the team at Aycliffe very inspirational and the project was a great learning experience."
