The NDT Engineer of the Year Award

Open award for members and non-members

Award criteria

Purpose: Awarded to the NDT Engineer apprentice achieving an excellent result at their end-point assessment in the year in question.

Details of the award: A certificate, £100 cash and an invitation to the NDT or CM Annual Conference Dinner with one night’s accommodation.

Eligibility: A BINDT apprentice who has achieved an excellent result at their end-point assessment in the year in question.

Nomination arrangements: The winner will be selected using the EPA scoring system.

Committee: Education & Professional Development

Winners

2025/2026 winner: Aaron Kirk

The NDT Engineer of the Year Award for 2025/2026 has been won by Aaron Kirk.

Aaron joined the Rolls-Royce NDT Engineer degree apprenticeship in 2021, where over the course of four years he undertook the NDT degree at the University of Northampton on residential weeks.

When he wasn’t at university, Aaron was in a mixture of placements at Rolls-Royce in a variety of areas, both aerospace and submarines, to gain a wide breadth of experience in shop-floor, engineering and technique development positions. He was fortunate to see the full product lifecycle, from development to manufacture and in-service stages, and has now taken up an in-service inspection engineering role, where he implements emergent solutions for in-service inspections at Rolls-Royce Inspection, Maintenance and Repair Services.

Over the course of the apprenticeship, Aaron learned the value of people and networking, that knowing the right people is the best way to be right first time. He enjoyed his time at university and was able to work with some excellent engineers. The value of adding context from the business to university learning helped him truly understand complex topics, as opposed to just ‘knowing’ the information.

Past winners:
2022/2023 Jonathan Brent BEng IEng MInstNDT

2023/2024 Nathan Bate
2024/2025 Matthew Kenworthy

Details of all Institute awards can be found here.