Ford says its apprentices are stepping out from behind the scenes of the Greenpower student racing series and building a car of their own. The carmaker has backed the STEM education programme for more than 20 years, using it to encourage young people into engineering. The apprentice-built entry is intended to put Ford’s own trainees in front of the students they are trying to inspire.
Ford has published a feature on its From the Road channel about a group of apprentices who are taking part in Greenpower, the student racing programme the company says it has supported for over two decades.
Two decades of backing a STEM series
According to Ford, its involvement in Greenpower goes back more than 20 years, with the aim of developing young science, technology, engineering and maths talent. Greenpower challenges school and college teams to design, build and race electric single-seaters, which makes it an unusually hands-on route into engineering compared with classroom-based outreach.
Apprentices move from support to the grid
The new element is that Ford’s own apprentices are no longer only helping others compete. The company says they are building a vehicle themselves and sharing their enthusiasm with students who are considering an engineering career. Ford has not detailed the technical specification of the apprentice-built car, the size of the team or the events it will contest.
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What it means
For Ford, the exercise doubles as recruitment. Europe’s carmakers are competing hard for electrical, software and battery engineering skills as production shifts towards electrified models, and apprenticeship schemes have become a central part of how manufacturers build that pipeline. Putting apprentices — rather than senior engineers — in front of teenagers also narrows the age gap between the people doing the talking and the people being recruited.
It is a small initiative in absolute terms, but it fits a wider industry pattern of tying STEM outreach directly to entry-level hiring rather than treating it purely as corporate sponsorship.
Availability
The full feature, written by Zining Zhang, is published on Ford’s From the Road site.
Source: ford.com