Mental health is something that businesses are needing to think more deeply about when it comes to the health and safety of their teams.
Workplace pressures including job insecurity, the stress of deadline pressures and more is leading to dangerous mental health outcomes – which left unchecked is not good for our industry as a whole.
It’s why HERA was pleased to sponsor this years University of Auckland’s MECHA wellness event which is designed to give support to its engineering students and drop the stigma around looking after mental health in lead up to exams.
MECHA was created by students noticing the lack of aid specifically for mechanical and mechatronics engineering students. The main focus being to help expose students to a wide range of career opportunities and directions while also supporting them in their daily lives as engineering students.
The UoA Mechanical & Mechatronics Engineering Student Associations saying: “As engineering students ourselves, we understand how stressful it can get towards the end of a semester. We do this event to help out our fellow students and hopefully make their lives a little more stress-free.”
“We recognise that exams can be an anxious time for some students with the crunch towards the end of the semester and the uncertainty that comes with the exams ahead. It’s why we hand out our wellness bags – this year, giving 100 out to our student members in the last week of classes before exam leave.”
At HERA we recognise that a large number of mechanical and mechatronics engineers work in the metals industry. That’s why we felt it important to connect with this event.
Our Manager Customer Experience, Rebecca Symonds saying: “It’s always important to support our up and coming future engineers – firstly for encouragement into their exams, and secondly putting our name in front of them as a link into our industry and our members as future employers.”
“We’re also in the process of developing out our student membership offering so we can grow this relationship. We hope this will allow us a mechanism to provide more information about the metals industry and the important work that we deliver so they’re inspired to join us in the future.”
“We also hope this will lead to greater industry collaboration so that we can work towards offering internships to students to assist in their foundational development and potentially lead on to grad roles and further career opportunities.”
