I was in Aberdeen earlier this month, attending the excellent Floating Offshore Wind conference organised by Scottish Renewables and RenewablesUK, and it reminded me that it’s the latest of an almost constant stream of well-attended energy events the city has hosted this year.
It underlines the city’s impressive hold on its international recognition as Europe’s energy capital and reflects fairly on the expanding breadth of energy engineering undertaken in the region.
In a few short weeks, I’ll be back again for the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers (AFBE-UK) Gala and Awards evening in Aberdeen, an event I am particularly looking forward to for the opportunity to be part of a celebration of engineering led by an organisation I hold in the highest regard.
Whilst this will be my first time attending AFBE’s headline annual event, I have already had the pleasure of meeting, hearing, and connecting with their inspirational co-founder and chair, Dr Ollie Folayan MBE, a chartered chemical engineer working in the energy sector in Aberdeen who is also credited with a PhD in the environmental impact of fuel combustion.
Ollie’s impressive track record in engineering spans decades of complex onshore and offshore high-value capital projects, but it was through his work as an award-winning diversity champion that I met him in 2019. AFBE was founded by Ollie and his sister, Dr Nike Folayan, in 2007 and exists to challenge and inspire people of black and minority ethnic (BME) origin to make enhanced contributions and add value to their communities using engineering as a platform. Funding from sponsor companies enables them to run year-round programmes for educational outreach plus individual and company support through mentoring, networking, and training.
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The need for organisations like AFBE remains clear; engineering employees from black and minority ethnic backgrounds make up around 8% of the UK’s engineering employment, or around half of the representation you would expect based on our demographics. For black and minority ethnic women that drops to around 1%, so for a sector already struggling to attract the skills it needs for now and the future, we should be grateful - and show our gratitude - to AFBE for their work to improve another metric where we are missing half or more of the available population.
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Scotland’s structural skills shortages leave industry desperate for talent, so within our sector it is more important than ever to ensure that we attract the best talent from across all of society; it’s not only the socially just approach, but also a commercial necessity. I caught up with Ollie last week to ask him where the challenges still lie and his answer was an honest appraisal that there is progress; there are improvements, but they simply aren’t at the pace that we would wish them to be. It’s an appraisal repeated in any other measure of diversity improvement we could choose to consider.
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He went on to say that where there is support, and allyship, it’s welcome and tends to be strong and useful in balancing out the frustration at the slower pace of change or carefully concealed bias. It will not help us to always see the glass half empty, but there is no value in ignoring the uncomfortable reality either. We swapped recent examples that remind us that we have a way to go. For Ollie it was job candidates maintaining two LinkedIn profiles to find a way around the conscious bias that would see them drop out at the first screening gate of recruitment. For me it was the company hiring graduates with the right to carry on working in this country for a period after graduating but could not find rental accommodation willing to offer them a lease, until a company director started accompanying them to property viewings.
To return to my excitement for AFBE’s event next month, a celebration of excellence in engineering is my idea of a good night out, with seven award categories ranging from Young BME Professional to Company of the Year, plus the opportunity to hear Ollie speak once again. A speaker can be inspirational to you, but it takes a much broader connection to silence a room of 600 people to the point where you could hear a pin drop as they are drawn into a clear and compelling call to action. That was our experience when we were lucky to have Ollie speak at our own 2022 awards dinner, and in case anyone is wondering if this is simply a drawn-out sales pitch for the AFBE event, too late, these tickets sold out weeks ago and there are still six weeks to go.
When I spoke to Ollie, one of my reasons for doing so was on the back of a post Scottish Engineering made for Black History Month celebrating inspirational engineers from the past. It prompted this piece because whilst I recognise the value of reflecting on history, if I am honest, I would far rather celebrate someone or something that is alive now and driving society forward, and AFBE and Ollie are certainly that.
Paul Sheerin is chief executive of Scottish Engineering
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