Gorillaz recruits female engineers for Jaguar Land Rover via VR app

Groundbreaking virtual reality (VR) band Gorillaz has teamed up with car maker Jaguar Land Rover to recruit designers, coders, and software engineers through a novel interactive app.

Applicants are tasked to explore the Gorillaz App, a 360° environment simulating the band’s garage, where they will take on a two-part tech and coding challenge, according to a press release.

The first part of the in-app challenge involves assembling the Jaguar’s first all-electric five-seater car, the I-PACE Concept. The second, more demanding part of the in-app challenge tests the applicants’ analytical and coding skills, where they are tasked with cracking codes and ciphers in a virtual environment.

Recruiting more female engineers

Jaguar Land Rover hopes that this initiative will attract a diverse range of talent, identify the brightest minds in the field, while hopefully tackling the UK’s engineering skills shortfall and attract more women to the profession. The manufacturer claims that the UK’s engineering sector has a shortage of at least 20,000 practitioners per year.

The UK is also touted to have the lowest percentage of female engineers in Europe, with only about 9% of its engineering workforce being female, a statistic that has remained unchanged since 2005 according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

The code-breaking challenge is hoped to inspire budding engineering and tech wizzes, especially young women to the STEM field.

PHL's dismal lack of scientists, engineers

The UK isn’t the only country with shortfalls in the engineering and tech field. In the Philippines, there are only around 130 Research Scientists and Engineers (RSEs) per 1 Million population—a dismally low number compared to the other countries in the region, such as Japan with 6,189 RSEs per million population and Singapore at 6,556 per million.

Engineering is also considered a male-dominated field in the Philippines, having 32 female to 100 male graduates in the engineering and technological disciplines (NCSB, 2010). A 2008 study by JICA in-house consultant Cristina Santiago states that Filipino female students are found to traditionally enroll in health-related courses while male students enroll in engineering and technology related courses. — TJD/KVD, GMA News