What would you tell employers are the most important things about attracting, inspiring and engaging graduate engineers? I believe that we all aspire to be “ better tomorrow than we are today ” and this is instrumental when looking to start a career. The most important thing for employers to attract young talent would be to meet this aspiration by offering opportunities for growth and fostering a continual development culture. Raphael Amajuoyi receives his Graduate of the Year Award The 2017 CIBSE Young Engineers Awards shortlist What do you remember about the evening? The CIBSE graduate of the year 2017 awards evening was a very special one for me. It’s very hard to find one word or sentence that summarises the experience because there was a lot to take in. Arriving at the IMechE around 16:00 for protocol briefing, meeting the competition whilst trying to suppress the nerves was the biggest challenge of the evening for me. I remember getting ready for

Initially we believed that these Awards were for other people, however, InTandem was encouraged to apply for Employer of the Year by a number of customers after working in partnership with them to raise the level of BEMS knowledge among their mechanical and electrical engineers. We are extremely pleased we did get involved with the Awards as the recognition and connection with Young Engineers has been terrific. Once we got started with the application (an easy process via the on-line form), we realised that the intiatives we implement to develop our own staff’s knowledge and skills were not being as widely adopted by the industry as we had assumed. Most of these methods (industrial placements/internships/mentoring/work experience) are readily accessible to all businesses all over the UK. However, maybe there is little knowledge of such schemes or lack of confidence to engage with them. From our experience over a number of years, we have found that these College/University pl