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He has spent the past 25 years working for MIRA in a variety of posts, including playing a leading role in the creation and delivery of the £300m MIRA Technology Park, which was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2018.
Spall’s long association with the IMechE began with the regional teams in the North West and Birmingham through their Automotive Division Centres. He progressed to be chair of the Automobile Division Board in 2007, and was a member of the Trustee Board between 2009 and 2014. He has played a key role in the development of Formula Student over the past two decades, including being its chief judge and part of the core team that created the new FS-AI competition.
In May, he began his term as president of the IMechE – and recently he spoke to Professional Engineering about his plans for the year ahead.
One of your first challenges is to implement the proposals that come out of the ongoing governance and finance reviews – how big an effect will they have on the Institution?
“It will transform the governance of the Institution. The review teams did a very thorough job, analysing thousands of member survey responses on many aspects of governance. Over the last year, I have been leading a team tasked with converting the recommendations into implementable solutions. We are now starting to roll out many of these changes which are designed to transform the Institution, creating a new governance structure that will allow the IMechE to flourish and better serve its members and the wider public for the decades ahead. As president, sadly I will no longer be leading this group but rest assured I will be keeping a close eye on progress and helping them where I can.”
What particular areas of engineering would you like to focus on during your term?
“I will be taking a great interest in automotive and in particular future mobility, not just because that’s my home turf, but because of the metamorphosis that is happening right now! The auto sector has always been a massive contributor to the global economy and it is important that we do what we can to ensure it continues to deliver and prosper as it transitions to electrification and automated driving.”
What role can the IMechE play in tackling the skills crisis in engineering?
“I do want to talk about the next generation of people coming through. What, or perhaps who, is going to inspire the next generation and what role should we play in this? How are we going to make sure we are capturing the young people who have the ability and ensuring they have the opportunity to become engineers? OK, we’ve got things like Formula Student, but that’s when they’ve already decided to become engineers. Further upstream you’ve got capable young people, who could become really top-notch engineers, but they decide to do something else. I’ll be certainly working with government on this and lots of other like-minded organisations who want to ensure young people who have the ability have the opportunity. It is an amazing profession, full of talented people who deliver world-changing projects and are so often misrepresented and understated.”
Could the IMechE be working more closely with government for the good of engineering as a whole?
“I think, although we’re right on the doorstep of Westminster, we’re not close enough to Westminster. We need to be if we’re going to make a difference and really start to promote engineering. With where we are now in the post-Brexit world, it’s like a blank canvas for us to go out there and to really make our case as to what we can do for the country. Once Covid starts to be referred to in the past tense, the government will be focused on how we rebuild our economy. Hopefully there will be a stronger appreciation of the wealth-creation potential of engineers and a realisation of the fact that we’ve got an insufficient number and we need to build a stronger pipeline of talent.”
What would you like to have accomplished at the end of your year as president?
“I am ambitious by nature but I have also grown to be realistic too. I’d like to think that in a year’s time we will have completed our governance transformation, we will have a vibrant Institution valued by its membership and respected worldwide. A move to realign the Institution to improve member relevance will be very much in evidence. Members will have read about our positive engagements with government. And, despite Covid, I would hope that our financial prudence now will ensure we emerge in good shape.
“I suspect the post-Covid world will never be the same as the pre-Covid world and we will have gained a reliance on virtual means of engagement, which is a positive, but I feel there will always be a need for engineers to meet and converse and I hope the Institution is once again fulfilling its purpose in facilitating that by the time I hand over office.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.