Secondary school students were given the opportunity to speak to employers and get hands on in more than 30 interactive workshops at the Festival of Work 2025, held at Lakes College, Lillyhall.

The festival – organised by social enterprise All Together Cumbria – aims to inform and inspire local young people about the abundance and variety of career paths open to them in industries typically associated with hard hats and hi vis.

More than 50 local businesses and organisations took part in the festival, which included a huge exhibition spread across the Lakes College, National College for Nuclear and BEC Construction Skills Centre.

Many staged interactive workshops that covered everything from bridge building, brick laying and scaffolding to mechanical and electrical engineering, design, IT, robotics, team building and how to develop a personal brand. Meanwhile, Cumbria-based Professor Pumpernickel wowed the students with an array of fun scientific experiments to entertain and inspire them in a fun and engaging way.

Andy Dodds is Social Enterprise Manager at All Together Cumbria, which works with stakeholders across the public and private sectors to develop a pipeline of talent for local industry and support people into work.

He says: “The Festival of Work brings the huge range of diverse career paths in the construction, engineering and nuclear sectors to life for young people. It helps to dispel the perception that they only offer hard hat type roles and that they, along with the abundance of other supporting roles on offer such as Planning, Management, HR and Communications, aren’t skilled. They certainly are, and careers in these sectors can be hugely rewarding. The world really can be their oyster.”

This year’s event was held in partnership with Lakes College and, for the first time, The Nuclear Industry Benevolent Fund (TNIBF). The Fund awarded a community grant to stage the Festival as part of its commitment to increase employability, engagement, and awareness of the nuclear sector in our community for the benefit of the industry’s future. TNIBF is a registered charity that supports those working or who have worked in the UK nuclear industry and their dependants through the provision of support, signposting and financial assistance.

Eldon Garnett, Managing Director – Nuclear at Morgan Sindall Infrastructure said: “It is truly inspiring to attend the Festival of Work and see the hundreds of local young people engage so positively with businesses. There are many cogs turning that ensure businesses such as ours run smoothly, so we need to grasp opportunities to bring the variety of roles to life. Morgan Sindall Infrastructure invests heavily in apprentices and graduates each year. They are the future of the business, our industry and the communities in which we operate.”

The Festival was sponsored by Morgan Sindall Infrastructure (which owns All Together Cumbria), Morgan Sindall Construction, Cavendish Nuclear, Orano, Balfour Beatty Kilpatrick and National Highways. Josh MacAlister, MP for Whitehaven and Workington, also attended the day to see first-hand the scale and impact of the event, describing it as “fantastic” and pressing home the message that “young people can be a really big part of the future.”