The announcement was made at an open day on Friday 16 November 2018, where secondary school children heard from Facebook’s product teams about their career paths.
To mark its support for the campaign, Facebook is launching a mentorship programme to unlock engineering talent. Working with educational programme JUMP, the scheme will give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds one to one mentoring with Facebook engineers.
Dr. Susan Scurlock, founder of Primary Engineer Programmes said: “It’s been fantastic to see the students interviewing the Facebook product teams as part of the ‘If you were an engineer what would you do?’ competition. It’s really important for students to understand the breadth of opportunities in engineering and we have heard about some amazing roles here at Facebook today.
“We need to allow all young people to identify opportunities for themselves within engineering if we are to increase diversity in the profession. We look forward to seeing the designs from today as part of the competition where some will be selected to be made by engineering teams from partner universities”
Kyle McGinn, director of product at Facebook, said: “Supporting emerging STEM talent is something we are really committed to, which is why we’re pleased to welcome hundreds of aspiring young engineers at our offices today and launch our mentoring programme. Facebook’s largest engineering hub outside of the US is based right here in London and our teams have worked on some of our biggest global innovations including Oculus and Workplace.
“We’re proud to say we’ll be hiring hundreds more engineers in the next year as part of our wider investment to the UK and as we expand, we want to encourage the UK’s next generation of talent as part of our support for Year of Engineering and through our new mentorship program.
“Engineering makes a major contribution to the UK economy, but the sector faces a major skills gap and lack of diversity – there is annual shortage of 20,000 engineering graduates each year, only 12% of the engineering workforce is female, and less than 8% comes from a black, Asian or ethnic minority background.”
