Last October, I was asked to take over as CEO of what was then known as “ESCO” – the Electronic Systems Community. ESCO was originally created in 2011 by the NMI and GAMBICA as a result of the Minister for Business Mark Prisk, who asked them to pull together the industry to document what the electronic systems community actually did and how government could help them. The result was the ESCO report, and I was proud to be an active participant in its creation.
I was concerned that much of the momentum of ESCO had been lost since the original report, despite the industry realising it was far bigger than it expected: more than one million people employed by over 45,000 companies! One thing I realised was that nobody could ever remember what ESCO actually was – what is an “ESCO”? Also I realised that ESCO embraced a far broader community than just electronics and electronic systems – it also included all the higher power electrical and electro-technical industries, as well as embedded software community. These are all bound together by a common set of skills: understanding hardware that relies on volts and amps.
If you do start thinking about it, you realise that pretty much everything you can think of relies on some sort of electronics or electrical power to work. From the smallest microchips to the biggest power stations; from the homes and offices we live and work in to the datacentres powering the internet: everything relies on ElecTech. ElecTech is the electronics and electrical hardware – everything that uses voltage and current plus the highly specialised software that controls it, which is known in our world as “embedded software”.
We need to pull together as an industry and work together to harness the enormous economic potential and global influence our industry possesses. We all know that our industry moves faster than almost every other industry sector – but nobody knows about us! Its time we worked together to educate our peers, our teachers and parents, and our government that backing ElecTech is one of the best decisions you can make – for our children, our economy and for our future post-Brexit success.
