The Engineering Support and Technologies (EST) division was created as part of the 1995 restructuring to succeed Mechanical Technologies Division (MT) with an enlarged mandate to provide, for the whole of CERN, centralized engineering services and not only mechanical technologies.

In January 1996 the division started with most of the staff of MT division, except for some engineers and technicians who integrated into the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Division.

EST was joined by the new manufacturing workshops of Particle Physics Experiments (PPE), the survey group of Accelerator Technologies (AT), and support specialists for informatics and experimental areas from Accelerator Sector (AC), Accelerator Technologies (AT), Computing and Network (CN), Electronics and Computing for Physics (ECP) and Particle Physics Experiments (PPE), resulting in a total of some 245 permanent members of staff.