Scottish Engineering 150th anniversary awards dinner

This year’s Scottish Engineering awards dinner, celebrating their 150 year anniversary, was a genuinely stirring and thought provoking event.

It was kicked off in excellent, patriotic style by the award winning Scottish Power Pipe Band which served to focus the audience on the real significance of the event.

The night was topped and tailed excellently by Scottish Engineering Executives Tom Sreeves, Bryan Buchan and John Howie. As ever there was an appropriate focus on the challenges currently presented to the Scottish Engineering sector both domestically and internationally. The message being that the only real constant is change and that our focus needs to be upon remaining both informed and agile.

The entertainment was provided by the always excellent Fred MacAulay and often dangerous Jeremy Paxman. As a supplier of recruitment services, it was interesting to learn that Mr Paxman, having initially rejected the opportunity to host a revived University Challenge, had suggested to the show’s most famous previous host, Bamber Gascoigne, that the show was to be revived, they were looking for a host and he should “get in there”, only to learn that Bamber had already been approached and had turned the offer down. That’s showbiz and recruitment for you.

It was interesting to hear Jeremy Paxman muse upon his career spent interviewing people from across the political spectrum. Where he claimed to be, at all times, simply driving towards “testing their humanness” by determining whether they were in fact, reasonable, reliable and trustworthy. It seemed that this was something of a crusade on his part, not to damage or harm but to get to the truth.

Awards and winners
Current success and achievements across the industry were both recognised and rewarded during the course of the evening with a number of our own long term clients, FMC Technologies, Parson’s Peebles, Hydrasun and Clyde Union, receiving awards.

Read the full list of awards and winners on our news page.

150 years
Finally, in our fast moving information rich, decision hungry world it’s easy to either ignore or be quite blasé about anniversary’s whether they be 15 years as with Escape or 150 years as with Scottish Engineering. It is, to me at any rate, really quite astonishing that a collective of engineering employers established the group that is now “Scottish Engineering” in the same year that the American civil war ended. This thought inspired in me a sense of real pride and pleasure to be in some small way involved in this excellent event. Celebrating sustained achievement through arguably the most significant period of change in human history.

Our Engineering, Manufacturing & Supply Chain team specialise in recruiting within: