Institution news
Q: What is CHAIN and where did the idea come from?
Benjamin Mills-Wallace (BMW): CHAIN is an event designed to engage, inform, and inspire early career engineers across all forms of engineering. The event is supported by a number of different engineering institutions, with each institution submitting an inspirational speaker. Each speaker is given 15 minutes to deliver a talk of an inspirational nature as well an additional 5 minutes to promote their particular institution.
The aim is to give the audience an idea of the number and range of institutions, their roles, and the benefits that each institution can provide. It is aimed at anyone falling into the Young Member category – from students and apprentices to recent graduates and those aiming to gain professional registration. CHAIN is intended to be a neutral, level platform for the institutions to sell themselves, from the smallest to the largest.
Nick Valentine (NV): The concept for CHAIN began in 2013. I’d been to an Institution of Mechanical Engineers' young members meeting where we were discussing how to engage with more members. How do we let more young engineers know about our institution and the opportunities it provides?
At the time I also ran the engineering society at the university of Salford and we’d recently held a talk from a civil engineer on the topic of building information modelling. Being a mechanical engineering student I wasn’t expecting to engage with the talk particularly well. However I was fascinated by it, especially when the speaker mentioned that this was a topic that civil engineering had borrowed from mechanical engineering. I thought to myself, there must be other examples like this, how can we get the different engineering disciplines to learn from each other?
So I had these two seemingly separate concepts in my mind, how to get more people to engage with the engineering institutions, and how can we better learn from the different disciplines that make up engineering? It took a few days to come to the idea of a conference, but I remember sitting on a tram in Manchester and the idea came to me. A conference run specifically for young engineers, as a collaboration between the different institutions. I phoned a friend in the Salford engineering society and pitched the idea to him.
Q: Was it all plain sailing from there?
NV: It sounded easy. It wasn’t. We were almost starting from scratch. We wanted a new concept, and a separate brand. A free to attend neutral platform on which all of the institutions would have an equal voice, differing from the usual technical lectures in that we were looking to inspire our audience. We were far more interested in the stories people had to tell rather than the technical details.
As this was new for the institutions it was a difficult concept to get across. We also had to find a venue with the very limited funds we had. But more importantly we had to come up with a name.
Q: And CHAIN was born...
NV: Initially we worked with the ‘Greater Manchester Young Engineers Forum’, or GMYEF for short. Catchy it was not. We were trying to develop a new concept within the engineering institutions, and we needed a name to complement that. We settled on CHAIN because we liked the idea of each engineering discipline representing a link in the engineering whole, without one discipline our world wouldn’t work. And of course a chain is an engineering component, it just seemed perfect.
So we took the time to build our brand, including the website and social media, and got the different organisations on board. We had a lot of support from the institution's north west region, Manchester metropolitan university agreed to give us a lecture theatre for free, and the IET Greater Manchester Young Professionals would film the talks for us.
Q: What should people expect from the event?
BMW: It should be a really good event, and a great opportunity for all young engineers, either those at university or in the early stages of their career. Those attending will get to hear a number of amazing talks from some very inspirational engineers, and hopefully take something meaningful away to help them in their study or day job.
As we have the networking event afterwards, it will also be a good opportunity to meet other engineers at similar stages in their career. For those who are still at university, the event should hopefully provide insight as to all the different career possibilities that are available through studying for an engineering degree.
Each speaker will also have about 5 minutes to talk about their nominated institution, and provide better insight as to what each of the institutions does and the differences between them. This is particular beneficial for those who have been in an engineering role for a couple of years and are considering going for professional registration as an Incorporated Engineer (IEng) or Chartered Engineer (CEng).
The event can also be used to demonstrate Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for those who are already professionally registered.
For further information about the event and how to book your tickets, visit the CHAIN web page.