Within the EPC family, our members have continued to face enormous challenges and the EPC offers thoughtful leadership and representation to ensure we can best support our members in meeting these challenges. Alongside events and blogs, members can access the EPC’s online bank of best practice resources such as out toolkits and our data explorer. Click on each of the tabs below to see some of our highlights:
Launched in June 2025, our brand-new Inclusive Employability Toolkit – supported by Canterbury Christ Church University, Equal Engineers, The Royal Academy of Engineering and Wrexham University – is a resource designed to help engineering educators integrate EDI principles and practices in engineering, computing, design and technology – across education, employer engagement, career preparation, and progression into the workplace.
The Inclusive Employability Toolkit, formerly known as the EDGE Toolkit, was originally developed in partnership with Canterbury Christ Church University, Wrexham University, and Equal Engineers. Following funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering, the two universities have now collaborated with the Engineering Professors Council to relaunch the resource under its new name. This newly relaunched version has been redesigned and enhanced to improve the toolkit’s usability and ensure wider accessibility for students, educators, and employers alike.
This toolkit is more than a set of activities – it’s a strategic resource for students, graduates, academics, employers, and managers. It provides tools to develop the employability skills needed for graduate-level roles and long-term career progression in STEM fields.
At the heart of the toolkit is a focus on inclusion, diversity, and the power of bringing your authentic voice – especially social minority experiences – into the world of work.
As of June 2025, twelve activities are available labelled Activities A through L, alongside a new addition to the toolkit: the University Career Services Library.
We will be launching additional resources, including a How-To Guide / Case Study, designed to facilitate seamless integration of the activities and provide real-world examples of how the toolkit has been utilised by academics and students. This resource is scheduled to launch in September 2025, with the official Inclusive Employability Toolkit launch webinar taking place during the same month.
To learn more about the toolkit, click here.
2024 marked the first phase of development of the EPC’s Complex Systems Toolkit, generously supported by Quanser.
Complex systems shape our lives and day-to-day realities more than most people realise. At the intersection of computing, robotics, and engineering, ever more technology is dependent on complex systems, from AI to biomedical devices to infrastructure. Understanding both complexity and systems is critical to today’s engineering graduates, especially as the UK seeks to position itself as a leader in areas like advanced manufacturing and autonomous systems.
The Complex Systems Toolkit will be a suite of teaching resources, which may include a scaffolded framework of learning objectives, lesson plans, guidance, case studies, project ideas, and assessment models. These are intended to help educators integrate complex systems concepts into any engineering module or course.
The Toolkit materials will be created and developed by diverse contributors from academia and industry, representing a variety of fields and coming from multiple continents, and will be managed by a Working Group of subject experts from academia and industry, put together by the EPC and Quanser.
The Complex Systems Toolkit will launch in late 2025. You can learn more about it here, and register your interest or involvement here.
The year 2023 marked the initiation of the first phase of the Sustainability Toolkit. During this phase, we began collaborating with our Sustainability Toolkit Steering Group, a diverse team of academic, industry, and advocacy leaders committed to sustainability, who played a pivotal role in guiding the development of key outputs.
The Sustainability Toolkit was developed by the Engineering Professors Council with the generous support of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Siemens Digital Industries Software as part of the profession’s continued efforts to integrate and embed greener / sustainable practices into engineering education and the Academy’s wider Engineers 2030 project.
In 2024, the EPC officially launched the Sustainability Toolkit to address the immediate and critical need to enhance sustainability awareness and skills, particularly in Engineering education, to ensure the engineers of tomorrow can rise to the challenges of the climate emergency.
To launch the Sustainability Toolkit, we participated in a series of events to showcase this much-needed resource for integrating sustainability throughout engineering education.
In the first of two launch events for the Sustainability Toolkit, we presented at the Engineers 2030: Rethinking engineering and technology skills for the 21st century event on 18th March 2024. The event was co-created by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Engineers Without Borders UK, part of the Academy’s wider Engineers 2030 project.
The second launch event was the Introducing the Sustainability Toolkit: Webinar hosted by the EPC on 28th March 2024. We had a large turnout, and attendees were excited to hear about the Toolkit, to view the resources featured in the Toolkit and to see a live demonstration of the ways in which the Toolkit can assist engineering educators in seamlessly integrating sustainability content into their teaching curriculum.
The current President of the EPC, Professor John Mitchell penned a blog to introduce this ground-breaking initiative that is focused on ensuring greener practices are implemented in engineering education . Click here to read John’s blog.
The first phase in the development of the Sustainability Toolkit also involved the creation and publication of 12 guidance articles, 18 different teaching resources (see here and here), including 5 case studies, and a library of links to sustainability communities and networks that promote collaborative efforts. Additionally, the toolkit directs users to our Sustainability Resources Library (a library of open-source supplementary engineering education materials). The sustainability toolkit also features a variety of insightful guest blogs, which you can explore here.
In time for the launch of the Sustainability Toolkit we also introduced a specialised search tool which works across all of our toolkits, and allows users to search multiple toolkits at once by topic and type of material to find exactly what they need in order to enhance their work and expand their expertise.
We plan to commence Phase 2 of the Sustainability Toolkit very soon. This phase will involve working to enhance and promote the Sustainability Toolkit by:
- Launching a Sustainability Ambassadors Community,
- Building a user-friendly portal to maximise impact and effect change globally by expanding our reach and creating an open-access platform where users can also submit their own resources for review and inclusion,
- Forming a community of reviewers,
- Creating more resources,
And much more…
If you would like to support Phase 2 of the Sustainability Toolkit, please see here for more details.
In the meantime, we are continuing to add to our Sustainability campaign with resources for the Toolkit, such as personal blogs and frequently updating our Sustainability Resources Library. If you have any open-source links to online engineering education resources that you’d like to share, please feel free to send them to us, and we will add them to our library. If you would like to submit a blog, please do get in touch.
The EPC launched the Engineering Ethics Toolkit in February 2022, and it continues to grow in content and in value.
This resource was developed by the EPC with the generosity and support of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as part of the profession’s on-going work to embed ethical practice into the culture of engineering. The EPC’s 2021-2023 President Prof. Mike Sutcliffe wrote a short blog to welcome you to this ambitious new initiative to ensure engineering education is a force for good, which you can read here. The first and second phases in the development of the Ethics Toolkit involved the creation and publication of a range of case studies and guidance articles to help engineering educators integrate ethics content into their teaching.
The launch of our case studies and guidance articles, and the importance of these resources and embedding ethics into engineering education was reiterated by Prof. David Bogle just before our toolkit was live at the launch of the 2022 “Engineering Ethics: maintaining society’s trust in the engineering profession” report from the joint Engineering Council / RAEng, Engineering Ethics Reference Group. Our case studies come under the Education and Training actions of this report, which aim to support and improve how ethics is understood by those in the engineering profession.
2023 saw the development of activity enhancements for nine of our case studies, as well as the publication of thirteen new case studies and eight new guidance articles, as well as an update of the static ethics curriculum map which was also expanded into the interactive Ethics Explorer, which helps educators to get started on or develop their ethics journey, meeting them where they are at any stage of experience, and helping them to understand, plan for and implement ethics learning. This new content was launched in a well-attended webinar in March 2023.
2024 saw the launch of a specialised search tool which works across all of our toolkits, and allows users to search multiple toolkits at once by topic and type of material to find exactly what they need in order to enhance their work and expand their expertise. The Toolkit also saw the publication of further personal blogs, and ideas for academics to use and promote the Toolkit.
Early 2025 has seen the publication of much requested assessment materials, and the launch of a panel of reviewers who will handle all content submitted for publication in the Toolkit.
We are currently working on further projects to enhance and promote the Engineering Ethics Toolkit, including:
- A call for further toolkit contributions in the form of blogs, guidance, case studies and enhancements;
- Launching a competition and awards for educators using the toolkit;
- Creating further webinars, workshops and other events.
The EPC’s Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer (RIKT) Committee put out a call in July 2021 for members to submit academia-industry partnership case studies. By the end of the call, nearly 50 applications were received and a sub-group of the RIKT Committee shortlisted 25 of these to be presented at an online launch webinar for the Enterprise Collaboration Toolkit (formerly the Crucible Project) on the 16th February 2022. Over 120 attendees joined us for this online event which saw a huge range of case studies outlining innovative and engaging collaborations between academia and industry, as well as a guest lecture by Prof. John Patsavellas (Cranfield University).
Subsequent to this, the Enterprise Collaboration Toolkit was launched on the EPC website in April 2022 to showcase the case studies presented at the event but also many more: access to these individual case studies is an exclusive EPC member benefit. The RIKT Committee envisions this toolkit as a living and growing resource to help EPC members to find research funding, place graduates in employment, create work-based learning opportunities and so on. Next steps for the Enterprise Collaboration Toolkit include a system to allow members to contribute their own, or further case studies to ensure that this resource continues to grow.
The members only online Data explorer continues to go from strength to strength. We have added functionality to explore the annual EPC Enrolments survey, for not just one but two years, and added Takeaways to help you short-cut to some of the soundbites in the datasets. More table and chart options have also been added to the HESA data sections for flexibility and dynamic exploring.
The Data explorer presents data visualisations specially designed to help EPC members explore a wealth of engineering sector datasets and to show data customised to the interest of Engineering academics in any discipline. The data is arranged according to population:
- Applications and admissions;
- Student enrolments;
- Student completion;
- Academic staff;
- Enrolments survey.
These sections each contain a variety of questions that can be explored through interactive charts and tables. Additionally, members are able to download the dataset can be downloaded to allow sorting and presenting in ways that will be most helpful to them.
