#AskAnEngineer
Tomorrow’s Engineers Week is a week of activity aimed at challenging the
perceptions of engineering among young people, their parents and teachers.
The Week will celebrate the everyday engineering heroes behind the nation’s
favourite brands, events and celebrities. We’re already working with six everyday
engineering heroes, representing some of the biggest brands across different
industries in the UK. But we need more everyday engineering heroes from partners
and stakeholders to take part and represent even more sectors within the industry.
#AskAnEngineer is an easy way to get involved in Tomorrow’s Engineers Week. It is
a Twitter Q+A hosted by the everyday engineering heroes in partnership with
Tomorrow’s Engineers (@Tomorrows_Eng) with the aim of giving young people an
opportunity to ask questions about their career. This activity will give young people
an insight into what the engineering industry is whilst also challenging perceptions of
engineering.
The activity was first piloted last year, when David Martell, One Direction’s Sound
Engineer, and an everyday engineering hero, took part in a Twitter Q+A. In total, he
had 330 questions asked to him in 30 minutes about his engineering career.
Not to panic, you don’t have to be One Direction’s Sound Engineer to take part in the
Twitter Q+A (and you probably won’t have as many questions as David had). But you
do need an enthusiasm for your job and the engineering industry, to inspire young
people to consider a career in engineering.
To mark #TEWeek14, we want as many Q+As to take place on the 6th November.
We suggest that each engineer spends up to half an hour being asked as many
questions about their career as possible. Schools across the country will be invited to
take part and ask questions, meaning the activity can take place both during school
hours, and after.
The engineer taking part in the Twitter Q+A can stay within their working
environment.
Information for Partners/stakeholders
If you are interested in taking part in a Twitter Q+A, please email
monica.wilson@claremontcomms.com making it clear you’d like to take part. There’s
no specific time you’d need to go online to take part in the Q+A, but you will need to
confirm your involvement on the day of the Q+A just so we can make sure we
monitor for all the tweets!
We’ll be running several sessions with a set of everyday engineering heroes at set
times throughout the day, and are therefore unable to police any sessions you decide
to run yourself. It is also worth thinking about the structure of the school day and
suitable periods when you are choosing a time to hold your #AskAnEngineer Q+A. If
you are choosing an engineer to take part on behalf of a company please also
consider the young target audience (11-14 year olds) for the Tomorrow’s Engineers
Week campaign.
Pre-promotion
In the weeks running up to #AskAnEngineer, you are encouraged to tweet about your
participation. It’s advised that you tweet from the account you’re going to use to host
the Q+A (if it’s not your company account you’re using) and your company account,
to inform your followers of your activity. You may want to promote your tweets as
well, using Twitter Ads and on other company social media channels / internal
communications / websites.
All content will need to include your company’s Twitter handle and the hashtag
#AskAnEngineer. This is so that people can direct questions at you and you can pick
them up easily. Some examples of pre-promotion tweets are below:
-
I’m James, an #everydayengineeringhero from @XXYOURCOMPANY, and
I’m taking part in #AskAnEngineer for #TEWeek14. Tweet me, 11am on Nov
6
-
Questions about engineering jobs? #AskAnEngineer & get answers from me
a tech engineer for @XXYOURCOMPANY during #TEWeek14. Nov 6, 11am
-
You can #AskAnEngineer about their career on Nov 6 for #TEWeek14. I'm
James, a Tech Engineer @XXYOURCOMPANY and I’ll be online from 11am
How to take part:
- Conduct the pre-promotion activity above. In addition, you may want to
identify some key influencers in your industry to tweet about the Q+A taking
place just before hand. You could even organise a Thunderclap Twitter event
to publicise your Q+A.
- Using your own Twitter handle or your company’s, log onto Twitter at the
specific time chosen for your Q+A
- Introduce yourself with a tweet explaining who you are and to launch the
activity. Please use the hashtag #AskAnEngineer for each tweet you send
- Questions will begin to come in. As they do, pick questions you feel
comfortable answering. Don’t forget you may want to ask some friends and
colleagues to think of some questions to get the ball rolling!
- To answer a question, reply directly to the tweet, but include the hashtag
#AskAnEngineer
- All answers should contain some knowledge of your career, but feel free to
incorporate your personality into the tweets.
- After an 30 minutes, close off the conversation with a tweet thanking
everyone for taking part and direct people to tomorrowsengineers.org.uk for
more information
If you are interested in taking part in a Twitter Q+A, or have any questions, please
email monica.wilson@claremontcomms.com (07789 070072