The Worshipful Company of Engineers, through its charitable arm the Engineers Trust, is honoured to recognise outstanding performance, leadership and impact across all branches of the Armed Forces and their civilian engineering support teams. The 2026 Awards were presented at the Engineers Trust Awards Dinner on 9th June 2026. Our Royal Navy Engineer Officer of the Year was on active deployment and was unable to attend.

Lieutenant Commander John Sawers Royal Navy

Lieutenant Commander Sawers is the Weapon Engineer Officer (WEO) of HMS VENGEANCE, a nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN).

Highly experienced, he is into his second full cycle as WEO but has also stood for a time as WEO aboard HMS AMBUSH, an ASTUTE-class nuclear powered submarine (SSN), and he began his career on TRAFALGAR-class SSNs.

This varied experience of submarine configurations and systems is the basis of his outstanding success and engineering leadership.

Aside from the current pressures, timelines and engineering challenges associated with SSBN force generation and deployment cycles, Sawers has stood out across the flotilla, in his escalation of issues, engagement with the Capability Sponsor and in communicating driving issues to peers in Navy Command Headquarters directly.

Taking the challenge of onboard information technology (IT) provisioning, network architecture and utilisation of non-operational devices head on, he drove his team to identify workable options and then presented them to Navy Digital. He shaped a platform Information Exchange Requirement for additional phones, devices, data and services, optimising and improving the legacy system onboard, whilst proposing reconfiguration of network ports onboard HMS VENGEANCE.

Communicated in regular learning-from-experience meetings and email exchanges, this allowed Navy Digital to make network configuration changes to enable new ways of working such as video teleconferencing and use of commercially-available artificial intelligence platforms. His regular liaison with Navy Digital staff has translated learning from experience and onboard action into funded measures to improve core-IT capability onboard.

Moreover, the reconfiguration and optimisation drive, originally conceptualised and trialled with HMS VENGEANCE, will now be funded and rolled out to the benefit of all SSNs and SSBNs, cutting bureaucracy and vastly improving a submarine crew’s ability to exchange information, drive outcomes and dynamically complete engineering reporting, planning and administration.

Lieutenant Commander Sawers’ work and advocacy has brought into focus and escalated the issue of IT bottlenecks and has ensured that real improvements are being made to in-service submarines. Sawers’ dogged pursuit of this issue, coupled with sound engineering judgment and outstanding leadership, has directly improved generation of his unit’s operational capability, whilst ensuring the best practices and ideas will deliver the same operational benefits and business process improvements across the submarine flotilla.

The Worshipful Company of Engineers Charitable Trust (the Engineers Trust) promotes the contributions of engineers to benefit society, education and research, and the relief of hardship and poverty.