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utILIty WeeK | 19th - 25th February 2016 | 17 output of 4,800MWh. The company supplies 55,000 homes with 100 per cent renewable electricity through a network of more than 1,000 independ- ent generators across the UK. If you have an asset or project you would like to see featured in this slot, please send your pictures and details of the project to: paul.newton@fav-house. com or call 01342 332085. Pipe up Nik Shelton E ngineers are natural born problem solvers, but there is one big problem that is proving harder than most to tackle. Our industry is heading towards a skills crisis. We all know it is coming, but what can we do to fend it off? The Royal Academy of Engineering says Britain needs more than a million new engineers and technicians by 2020. And to achieve this we need to double the number of engineering graduates and apprentices – no small feat. What's more, just 8 per cent of our engineers are women. So we're failing to appeal to young people in general, and girls in particular are mostly ignoring this vital profession as a career path. Around a third of Anglian Water's workforce will retire in the next decade and we need a plan for how we're going to replace them. That's why we're investing in education now and we're also looking for ways to inspire youngsters. The Greater Peterborough University Technical Col- lege is a new school opening this year specialising in engineering and the built environ- ment. The £10 million building will be packed with £2 million of equip- ment once it opens in September, enabling it to provide a world-class technical education for 14-year- olds embarking on their GCSEs, and 16-year-olds about to start A-levels and further education. Anglian Water is not just a sponsor of the college – we're supporting it every step of the way and we'll be guaranteeing job interviews to the students who successfully complete their studies there. The state-of-the-art building in Peterborough is a fan- tastic venue for us to show young people that engineering is an exciting and rewarding choice. On 17 February we invited all our major contractor partners there to be part of an engineering recruitment event – bringing young people face to face with the big names in the industry and giving them a real taste of what they could achieve. But there's more we need to do – going out into schools and communities, finding new ways to spread the message online and in the media and creating regu- lar opportunities for youngsters to be inspired. Because if we don't we'll be creating a problem for the next genera- tion that even our brightest minds will not be able to solve. Nik Shelton, media manager, Anglian Water "Around a third of Anglian Water's workforce will retire in the next decade; that's why we're investing in education" Operations & Assets We're failing to appeal to young people in general, and girls in particular