STEM Workshops in Sheffield

Sheffield is synonymous with steel and metalworking, a heritage stretching back to the fourteenth century. Henry Bessemer established his Bessemer Steel Works in the city in 1858, commercialising the revolutionary steelmaking process he had announced two years earlier and enabling mass production of steel for the first time. In 1913, Harry Brearley, working at Sheffield's Brown Firth Laboratories, discovered stainless steel while searching for a corrosion-resistant alloy, a material that now underpins industries from healthcare to construction. Sheffield's reputation as the Steel City was built on centuries of continuous metallurgical advancement.

Harry Brearley, born in Sheffield in 1871, discovered stainless steel in 1913, now one of the most widely used materials on Earth. Henry Bessemer developed and commercialised his revolutionary steelmaking process in Sheffield, transforming the city into the world capital of steel production. Sir Harry Kroto, educated at the University of Sheffield, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60), opening up the field of nanotechnology. Helen Sharman, born in Sheffield in 1963 and a chemistry graduate of the University of Sheffield, became the first Briton in space when she visited the Mir space station in 1991 as part of Project Juno. The AMRC, founded in 2001 through a partnership between the University of Sheffield and Boeing, has attracted engineers to the city.

Sheffield's advanced manufacturing sector is centred on the University of Sheffield's AMRC, which partners with Boeing, McLaren, Rolls-Royce, and BAE Systems. The AMRC campus houses Factory 2050, the UK's first fully reconfigurable digital factory, and the Nuclear AMRC, developing manufacturing technologies for the civil nuclear sector. Sheffield also has a growing digital technology sector, with companies such as Sumo Digital. The city's two universities produce a steady pipeline of STEM graduates.

Sheffield offers a wide range of STEM career pathways. The AMRC Training Centre provides apprenticeships in partnership with Boeing, McLaren, Rolls-Royce, and BAE Systems. The University of Sheffield's engineering faculty is consistently ranked among the best in the UK, with close AMRC integration giving students hands-on experience. The Nuclear AMRC is creating roles in nuclear engineering, while the digital sector offers growing opportunities in software development, games design, and data science.