Bring Your Child to Work Day

Our Area 12 STEM Ambassador Group arranged a ‘Bring your child to work day’ during the summer holidays to encourage more young people to consider Engineering as a career and provide greater awareness of our construction and engineering activities around the network.

This allowed us to reach local communities, to share what we do and why we do what we do in maintaining the strategic road network.

The invitation was open to all Area 12 employees to bring their children, between ages 9 and 16, to experience a day in the working environment.

We had 18 children attend the day with our STEM Ambassadors providing mentoring and activities throughout the day.

The day started with children spending time with their parents at their work areas simply experiencing what work is like.

The children then gathered in the canteen for a general welcome and induction which included a breathalyser test, simulating the fact that all our inductions include a drug and alcohol test. All the children passed!

There were then Computer Aided Design (CAD) sessions in the design and planning office, including designing traffic management layouts and producing a sign design using CAD, which the children printed out to add to their portfolio for the day.

After lunch, our operatives gave the children a tour of various items of plant and machinery in the car park, including a gritter, impact protection vehicle (IPV), temporary traffic lights, Intellicone and a Tactical Incident Response Team (TIRT) Command Vehicle.

The final activity of the day saw the children compete in small teams, building bridges from paper, which then went under testing to destruction.