Local Students Get STEM Exposure at McLaren

Pupils from a local school were the special VIP guests of retailer McLaren Birmingham in Solihull where they got to find out for themselves how pursuing a science or maths based career helps to create some of the world’s most iconic sportscars and supercars.

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Year 7 students from Alderbrook School met engineers and designers from McLaren Automotive to find out about what inspired their own journey to the luxury car company and how they use their skills to help push the boundaries of technology in the automotive sector.

The children also got a rare chance to sit in some of the marque’s famous models including a McLaren 570S Spider sportscar before having a chance to flex their engineering and coding brains by building and racing their own LEGO cars. To keep the students on their toes ahead of their LEGO build, McLaren tire Partner Pirelli also supplied a Batak game to test the students’ reaction times.

Local Students Get STEM Exposure at McLaren

The retailer-based event is a further new initiative from the car company to help broaden its extensive STEM and educational outreach to communities across the country.  McLaren Automotive already backs the UK STEM Awards (which has seen previous winners secure permanent roles at McLaren) and has partnered with the BBC on educational science programming for primary school age groups and above.

Developing the next generation of automotive expertise is vitally important to McLaren. As the company continues to grow, the need for a skilled workforce to design, develop, build and sell its cars is also expanding. Having just announced record global sales of 4,806 cars for 2018, the company needs to recruit over 800 people across a wide variety of roles from manufacturing and logistics to design, engineering and support functions.

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We’re passionate about our cars at McLaren Automotive because our people are passionate about what they do. It’s great for our STEM ambassadors who work at McLaren to help showcase their expertise to these students in the West Midlands and for them to help inspire the next generation to take-up science, maths, engineering and technology subjects. Not only do we want girls and boys to understand what a fulfilling and exciting career they can have by studying STEM subjects at school and beyond but we want them to see how much we value their creativity, energy and ambition which matches our own.

A big thank you to McLaren Birmingham and our partners LEGO Education and Pirelli for supporting the first-ever McLaren STEM retailer event which we hope will be the first of many.
 — Mandeep Dhatt, Executive Director of Human Resources, McLaren Automotive.

Ian Roberts, McLaren Birmingham, Aftersales Manager said …

Rybrook McLaren Birmingham is excited to be supporting McLaren’s STEM Programme, by hosting a STEM morning at our state-of-the-art aftersales facility in Blythe Valley Park, Solihull. It is an honour for our retailer to be championing McLaren’s initiative in inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers through this interactive, informative and fun morning.

“We hope that this event will broaden horizons for young people in our local area and open doors to future career opportunities that they may never have considered before. Being a part of McLaren Automotive and their involvement in STEM activities is something we pride ourselves on as a retailer. We look forward to being further involved in future STEM opportunities with McLaren Automotive and giving something back to young people in our local community.

 Note: Press release courtesy of McLaren Automotive

Staff