Marie Claire is the last place you would expect to find an article about a career in engineering. Yet the monthly fashion and celebrity magazine is one of a diverse array of mainstream titles now being targeted as part of an unusual recruitment campaign to redress the sector’s skills shortage.
The conventional approach to changing public perceptions to make occupations more appealing is to invest in a high-profile advertising campaign. Recent examples of this in the UK have included the Teacher Training Agency’s ‘Use your head. Teach’ initiative. However, the country’s engineering industry has instead turned to a new communications strategy that eschews traditional media in favour of stealth marketing techniques. If successful, it could become a model of its kind.
