A Queen’s Award-winning manufacturing business is inspiring engineers of the future by working as a partner of the WMG Academy in the Midlands.
T A Savery & Co, which trades as energy absorption specialist Oleo International and hydraulics expert Savery Hydraulics, has become an employer partner of the WMG Academy for both arms of the business and is working to educate budding young engineers on what a career in UK manufacturing looks like.
Oleo International gave a talk to students at the Coventry based WMG Academy for Young engineers on July 1, which focused on the corporate structure of an engineering company and how its departments all work together on a single project. This is the first part of Oleo’s contribution to the examination process where the company will deliver several unique modules to students, one focusing on product maintenance and the other on quality.
This September, the whole of WMG Academy’s Year 10 group will visit the Oleo site in Coventry for a factory tour before the new project is delivered to them. Oleo has planned for students to dismantle an elevator buffer and reassemble it, using a spares kit and instruction pack, under supervision at the WMG Academy. Once reassembled they will be collected and returned to the Oleo factory where they will be filled with oil and gas. Later in the month the students will be return to the Oleo factory to test their buffers and measure the output, with Academy tutors and OIeo engineers working together to decide what will be measured and how. In order to keep the students on their toes and thinking like engineers, Oleo will deliberately sabotage two buffers to show students what happens in a test if the buffers are not assembled correctly.
It is hoped that a hands-on project like this being delivered exclusively by WMG Academy and one of its employer partners will give budding young engineers both practical experience of as well as educating them about the processes in UK manufacturing organisations.
Sandy Andringa, marketing manager at T A Savery & Co commented: “By helping young people understand how diverse an industry manufacturing is in the UK, and giving them the chance to gain real hands-on experience, we are hoping that Oleo does its bit to help overcome the current skills gap that exists in the UK. Often, it takes direct experience for students to really learn about manufacturing processes, inter-department activities and how individual projects come together to create a single manufactured part.”
T A Savery & Co has been manufacturing its products in the UK for a number of decades and was recently awarded the Queen’s Award for International Trade. Both arms of the company are no stranger to education and run their own respective successful apprenticeship programmes.
The company has already taken part in a careers day for Coventry WMG Academy to help motivate Year 10 and 12 students about engineering, and showcased some of the hydraulics projects both sides of the business work on for sectors ranging from the Ministry of Defence to the rail sector. The company is also playing a role in helping to launch a new WMG Academy site in Chelmsley Wood, Solihull, and recently took part in a taster day for prospective new students.
