Aerospace awards open for applicants

After a period of abeyance during Covid times, the Aerospace Awards Committee has now announced that the awards for the current livery year, September 2021 to August 2021, are open for applications.

The structure of the awards was updated just prior to Covid and the new structure is now in place which makes the awards an exciting set of funding opportunities available for young people, ideally under 30, to help boost their careers in engineering. The awards fit nicely with the livery policy of supporting heritage skills, supporting current industry, and also supporting those looking into the future.

Full details can be found on the aerospace awards pages of the Coachmakers’ website under charity, then awards and bursaries. The pages can be found here.

This year the Victor Gauntlett award is available to support and promote heritage skills. An individual may apply for the award to support their own development by funding courses, tools or equipment they need but the award may also be granted to an older skilled person who wishes to run a course for several younger engineers, much in the form of a master class.

The university based awards are now available to those at all five London universities where we have an agreed focus (Brunel, City, Kingston, Imperial, and Queen Mary College London) as well as to Cranfield students. The student should apply for the funds for their own purpose. Whilst the funds are available to support the students in a variety of ways we look favourably on those applications which are requesting funding for an additional research project to enhance their learning over and above their normal studies.

All of the awards are open for anyone to apply through the application forms on our website and please do encourage your colleagues, friends and family to visit our site and pass the information to those who may benefit from the generous funding we have available.

For more information, please click here to download a file to share by email or to print for student, workplace, flying club and other noticeboards. Please do share the file and information about the awards but keep the sharing visible to friends and contacts only on social media as the overall Livery policy is not to share articles in open posts on social media.

Whilst we are publicising the current awards, the sub-committees under the Charity Committee are working closely with other committees to see how our award winners may feed and support the various livery programmes such as the Young Coachmakers’ programme. We are also seeing how we can support previous winners in their careers with the opportunities which could be found within the Coachmakers’ cadre. By beginning to actively engage with previous winners and catching up with their progress in their careers we have seen many of our previous winners have had real career and life boosts from having received our awards.

We are also developing an approach to provide mentoring and other non-financial support – such as company visits, internships or work placements – to award winners, both to assist them in their chosen careers but also to increase the link between the award winner and the Livery. So if you would like to help with mentoring our award winners, or might be in a position to assist them in other ways, then please contact Charity Chairman Assistant Eric Wallbank or the chairmen of the aerospace, coach making and automotive sub committees.

On the aerospace committee we welcome support and help from all liverymen, you do not have to be on the committee to help and we are always keen to have input when selecting winners from the applications and the ongoing support of not only the winners, but other high quality young talent who might have been award runners-up. You never know, you might discover your next super talented employee from our pool of wonderful young applicants.

Not only do the awards offer great funding for young people, they also offer great publicity for the Coachmakers and all our good work.