During 2012-2013 the Institute of Corrosion embarked upon a new initiative to address what has been perceived as a shortage of young or entrant engineers showing an interest in materials and corrosion. The initiative was developed by a group of ICorr members who formulated a programme and solicited speakers who then presented on a broad range of materials and corrosion control related subjects, these included:

• Basic corrosion
• Welding
• NDT
• Coatings
• Cathodic protection
• And non destructive examination

These presentations paved the way to the attendees being given case studies to consider, the attendees were placed into groups of four or five with each group being mentored by one of the subject presenters. The subjects the attendees had to consider in the case studies were:

• Wet gas pipelines
• Vessel welding
• d.c. interaction

This programme was instigated to address the changing demographics in materials and corrosion engineering. As time has gone by the number of engineers entering materials engineering has declined, this is for many reasons including, knowledge of the materials engineering, declining course availability and other courses that are considered as more exciting or rewarding. This decline in availability has in fact had a positive impact in creating demand for engineers having materials knowledge and training and therefore it can be a lucrative and rewarding career. The other driver for the programme was to better inform all engineering disciplines of the issues related to materials engineering and to raise awareness of the importance of asset integrity through correct materials selection, joining processes, inspection and corrosion control. These are important subjects for all disciplines to embrace, correct selection of materials and corrosion control are important to all engineering projects and can impact all areas where engineers work in one form or another.

Given the success of the programme in 2012-2013 it is the intention of ICorr to repeat it bi-annually, the next event will be starting again in the first quarter of 2015 and we are proud to announce that this event will now be run with the support of BP who will be sponsoring the event. BP sponsorship will take the form of a prize which will allow the wining team to attend either the NACE national conference in Vancouver, Canada in 2016 or Eurocorr 2016 in Montpellier, France.

The first module, The Fundamentals of Corrosion, will be presented by an industry leading expert. The programme due to venue size and administration issues will be limited to twenty attendees and requirements for attendance are that the candidate should be in employment in an engineering discipline, be working with an engineering company or manufacturer of engineering based products and they should complete the application form which can be downloaded from the ICorr website, candidates shall also provide a current CV. The organising committee will impartially review applications and the successful candidates informed in writing of the outcome of the review process.