College reports record number of female engineering apprentices

FORTH Valley College (FVC) in Stirlingshire has recorded a record number of female engineering modern apprentices (MAs) for an academic year.

19 women have started their apprenticeships in fields such as welding and fabrication, instrumentation, power distribution and mechanical engineering at the FVC Falkirk Campus.

They will all spend their first year at college, while being employed by companies including TechnipFMC, Petrofac, Scotrail, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Aker Solutions, WorleyParsons, Ineos and PetroIneos, Dupont and Scottish Power.

Dr Ken Thomson, principal of Forth Valley College said, “It is great to see a record number of women engineering modern apprentices start with us this year and we hope this will inspire even more women to think about engineering as a career. As a college we have been taking this message – which runs in parallel to the Scottish Government’s Gender Strategy – to schools and across the wider community for many years and we know our industry partners have been doing the same. We hope intakes like this will become the norm from now on.”