Words by Smiley Team
Sir James Dyson is now one of the richest people in the UK. But back in 1978 he was an inventor with an idea for a vacuum cleaner which didn’t need a bag, and worked using cyclone technology.
It took Sir James five years and 5,127 prototypes to make his idea a reality, and the Dyson vacuum cleaner was born.
Dyson is now a worldwide engineering enterprise of more than 10,000 people, half of which are engineers.
And as his business grew, Sir James, 74, decided to give back and uplift the next generation of engineers.
His charitable spending so far totals £120m, and includes the creation of the James Dyson Foundation, and the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology.
The Dyson Institute is a higher education institution based in Wiltshire, UK which supports students through a degree apprenticeship. They leave with a BEng (Hons) Engineering degree, and also a wealth of work experience acquired alongside their studies.
Students don't pay tuition fees, and instead are paid an increasing salary for each year they are on the course, meaning they can graduate debt-free.
The Institute wants to increase the number of women who go into a career in engineering, and 33% of the undergraduate engineers at The Dyson Institute identify as female, compared to a national average of 21% on undergraduate engineering courses in the UK.
This summer the Institute organised an online workshop attended by 200 young female engineers from around the UK, where they learned about different career paths in engineering and heard a taster lecture, led by Dyson Institute electronics lecturer Dr Nikita Hari.
Dr Hari, an invited global ambassador for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and a TEDx Speaker, commented: “We need engineers to solve the world’s problems; from farming and energy to automatization and space travel, there is a fascinating world of engineering life which knows no gender. Whether you are into sports or art, teaching or tech, there’s a place in engineering for you.”
To learn more about the Dyson Institute visit their website or follow them on LinkedIn.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
