EERN EDI engineering employability toolkit

Canterbury Christ Church University has responded to this challenge by establishing a new Equality, Diversity, and Inclusive (EDI) engineering, design, and technology education provision. This initiative aims to create an EDI 'industry-ready' talent pipeline, addressing regional skills gaps (Kent County Council, 2022; Southeast Local Enterprise Partnership, 2021). Additionally, this initiative supports regional economic growth, as diverse teams have been shown to achieve (Martins, 2020). Consequently, there is a pressing need for an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusive (EDI) engineering employability learning toolkit. This toolkit seeks to enhance the social capital and employability of female, global majority, and low socioeconomic students in engineering, enabling all students to secure meaningful engineering employment and educating the next generation of engineering recruiters. The toolkit builds upon previous research and development of the Canterbury Christ Church University Future 360 Framework (Employment toolkit), incorporating the Graduate Capital Model (Tomlinson, 2017), the internship framework (Shawcross and Ridgman, 2014), and principles of social capital learning (Brown et al., 2014).