Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy
Our EDI strategy is a five-year plan set out to support our members, volunteers, and colleagues, and the wider engineering and technology community. Equality, diversity and inclusion are core to our values and beliefs and run throughout our strategy as an institution.
We’ve recently revised our EDI strategy to better reflect our focus across all areas and the work we’re doing both internally and externally.
We’ve also developed an EDI action plan to summarise our key goals and activities.
See our one-page overview of our EDI Strategy.
Supporting Race and Culture through our EDI strategy
We’re dedicated to reflecting and representing a diverse community, both through the work we do and the people we employ. We are a professional home for every engineer and technician, and we want everyone, whatever their background, to feel included.
Equality
It's about ensuring that individuals are not viewed less favourably because of their individual characteristics, protected or otherwise.
Diversity
Aims to recognise, understand, celebrate and value the individual differences of everybody. These differences can be grouped under protected characteristics such as; gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Inclusion
Ensures that those diverse groups feel able to participate by fostering the right environment to work effectively together and that equal opportunity can be for the benefit of all.
Why is it important?
As one of the largest engineering institutions working globally to engineer a better world, we aspire to treat everyone equally with dignity, integrity and respect regardless of their background. It’s vital that every one of our members, volunteers and current and future colleagues, feel welcome, valued and respected and benefit from equal opportunity for all so that everybody can perform at their best.
We achieve this via our diversity efforts, embedding EDI into our policies, practices, procedures and behaviours throughout the institution, ensuring that recommendations are adopted, monitored and reported so that we make progress and maintain EDI excellence in all that we do.
By doing this, we can effectively meet the needs of everybody associated with the IET, the wider community and the profession. Advocating EDI in engineering is a crucial element in addressing the skills shortage that currently threatens the UK industry.
Whose responsibility is it?
The responsibility for EDI lies with each of us - colleagues, members and volunteers - and we will utilise the support from our Board of Trustees and Executive Team to embed EDI across the institution in order to drive this important topic.
Internal focus
- Attraction and retention of employees and volunteers
- Culture
- Policies, practices and procedures
External focus
- Collaborative opportunities: member and wider community engagement