Earlier this year, NuPace sponsored the Rotary Technology Tournament in Carlisle. Around 60 students from schools across the region took part. Our founder Stuart has been involved as Chief Judge for several years, and this year we backed the event financially as well.
What the competition actually involves
Students arrive in the morning with no prior knowledge of the task they are about to face. They receive their instructions and a pack of materials, then have thirty minutes to plan before the build begins.
This year the challenge was designing a device to clear debris from inside a pipe, with each age group working on the same core problem at increasing complexity: foundation teams built a vehicle to collect debris and reach the finish line, intermediate teams had to push debris through and reverse back to the start, and sixth form students worked with more difficult materials, pushing debris through, retrieving it and returning it to the start position.
The competition is electromechanical, which is relatively rare in STEM activities now, and students work with wood, structural components, motors and batteries in a way that makes it a genuinely well-rounded engineering challenge.
What makes it distinctive is the portfolio. Throughout the build, students document their thinking and the decisions they make. That portfolio is submitted and marked separately from the physical device they have built.
The part that stands out
Most people, when they think about engineering competitions, think about the build. Who constructed the most effective solution. Whose device performed best in the testing phase.
That matters, but the portfolio requirement is the more interesting element.
Being able to explain why you made the decisions you made, under pressure, with incomplete information and limited time, is one of the hardest things to do well in a professional environment. Most people develop it slowly, through years of experience in teams where the consequences of unclear communication become apparent the hard way.
These students were being asked to do it at 14 and 16, and watching them rise to that challenge was one of the most encouraging parts of the day.
What this has to do with programme delivery
The conditions of this competition are not that different from the conditions of a complex programme in its early stages. You arrive with ambition and intent. The full picture is not yet clear. You have to plan with what you have, make decisions under pressure, build something, test it, and be able to account for your reasoning to the people who are scrutinising the outcome.
The teams that struggle in complex programme environments are rarely the ones who lack technical knowledge; they are the ones who cannot translate that knowledge into clear decisions, documented reasoning and aligned action, and that gap between technical competence and delivery capability is real, and wide.
Why Cumbria matters here
The industries that depend on these skills are not abstract. Civil nuclear, offshore energy and advanced manufacturing are not theoretical career paths for young people growing up in Cumbria. They are on the doorstep.
Events like this one do two things. They develop real skills in planning, problem-solving and communicating under pressure. They also do something just as valuable: they show students what they are capable of. Many young people arrive unsure whether they can work through a challenge like this, and by the end of the day, they have the evidence that they can, a shift that carries further than the competition itself.
The talent pipeline for these industries doesn’t start with graduate recruitment or professional development programmes. It starts with students who learn to plan under pressure, build with incomplete information and communicate their thinking clearly, people who are better placed to do the same thing ten years later, in an environment where the stakes are considerably higher.
It’s worth remembering that the delivery capability our industries will need in ten years’ time is being built right now, in rooms most of us never walk into. The question is how many of them we’re actually paying attention to.
