Ayrshire College is UK’s top training partner
Ayrshire College has been named the UK engineering sector’s best training partner.
The College won the Training Partner of the Year award on 8 March 2017 at the prestigious Semta Skills Awards in London’s Hilton Hotel on Park Lane.
Ayrshire College was the only Scottish college or university represented at the ceremony, which was hosted by BBC presenter Alexander Armstrong.
The College’s STEM department took the award home after impressing judges with its #ThisAyrshireGirlCan campaign – which encourages more girls into engineering – and its successful organisation of the inaugural Mission Discovery Ayrshire programme.
Also highlighted as a worthwhile project was a course designed alongside Ryanair that took unemployed engineers and re-trained them for sheet metal work. Over 25 students have been employed following the course.
The College’s #ThisAyrshireGirlCan campaign has had great success in advancing equality and promoting apprenticeships to females. The campaign, which includes videos, blogs, case studies, events and a mentoring support network for female STEM students, was recently named Best Diversity Marketing and Social Issues Campaign at the Herald Diversity Awards.
Mission Discovery Ayrshire 2016 brought 200 school pupils and college students to the college, where they worked in mixed groups to design a space experiment with the help of NASA experts – including former NASA astronaut Michael Foale, CBE. The winning group’s experiment will be tested at the International Space Station in 2017.
Planning is already underway on the Mission Discovery Ayrshire 2017 programme.
Gavin Murray, Director of STEM at Ayrshire College, said “Receiving this award represents a true cross college approach to providing our partners from industry with high-end training within industry standard facilities. This award also recognises the tremendous initiatives within Ayrshire College to promote STEM subjects as a career and in particular the positive impact strategies such as #ThisAyrshireGirlCan has in encouraging women to consider a career in STEM.
“It was an honour to receive this award with colleagues Marti Anderson and Stuart Millar on behalf of everyone at Ayrshire College.”
Stuart Miller, Director of Education Contracts and Business Development at Ayrshire College said: “It is fantastic for the college to win this award, it shows how much we are dedicated to manufacturing and engineering in Ayrshire.
