31 January 2002
Engineers for the Future by Rod Macdonald
One of the key messages of the Association of Consulting Engineers ‘Engineering the Future’ campaign is recruitment and training. This issue is vital to the future of engineering and construction. Here are some of my thoughts, some are perceptions, not necessarily fact, and they are all personal. Nonetheless, I think that they are relevant.
Firstly, let’s just consider the problems.
There are too many diverse initiatives being run by engineers and the construction industry, all trying to do roughly the same thing. All this energy and effort is great, but as it is uncoordinated the impact that we could be having is diluted. Too many initiatives that are set up to attract young people into engineering are being run by volunteers and staff from generations removed from the young target audience and do not know how to communicate in the right, cool, way. When I was in my late 30’s, I realised that I was already too old to give careers talks in schools. Furthermore, the resultant mix of effort is confusing young people, their parents and their career advisors. How can we bring these worthwhile initiatives together, in order to make them more effective? We need to ensure that the right people are using their valuable time effectively, enthusing pupils, our engineers of the future, in the right way.
We should start by taking a long hard look at how we actually label ourselves as professionals. What we do, using our current labels, is not always obvious to a lay audience. For example, how many school pupils, or their parents, have ever heard of ‘Building Services Engineering’? Even if they are familiar with the phrase, then how many will know what the words actually mean? Does choosing to be a “Building Services Engineer” sound like a dynamic interesting and rewarding career? I think not. We work within an environment where most of the public thinks that architects design buildings. The whole building, in every respect. That other building professionals are involved does not even come into the frame. Young people who want to design buildings therefore study architecture, and are lost to the engineering design of buildings unless aware architecture course staff recognise aptitude for particular fields and encourage them to move across to a more focused engineering discipline during their studies. Many of our current best Building Services Engineers were encouraged to do just this by the late Ted Happold when he was Professor of Building Engineering at the University of Bath.
There are too many grim looking university engineering departments suggesting a grim unimaginative, uncaring career. Engineering is seen as too mathematically focused, too difficult and requiring long hours both at university and at work.
Engineers have tended to be the Martha’s of our society. Lacking in passion, heads down behind the parapet, allowing others to take both the credit and the blame. Engineers are always concerned that they have to get ‘it’ right, with little interest in learning and moving forward from mistakes, probably because mistakes are so costly, but as a result, they have a tendency to be boring.
We do not have the glamour of the media industry, the drama of medicine or the money of the city. We need to know and value what we are. But, what do I mean by engineering? I take an all-embracing view including the worlds of construction and manufacture.
Engineering is a rigorous art. Without rigour, it is not engineering.
Some years ago, in a TV documentary, scientists were being asked about the future. Naylor, a Californian Nano-technologist said, “Scientists do not know about the future. It is better to look to engineers. Scientists investigate the way the world works and record their findings. Engineers take what we know and create new things”. Described in this way, taking what we know and creating new things, engineering sounds like an attractive career. What is more it includes industrial design, product design, architecture and many other design jobs. I like the definition.
At the Arkwright Scholarship presentations in November last year, the President of the Royal Aeronautical Society spoke to the school pupils and parents, and presented engineering as being about real wealth creation – the real thing, not just playing with currency and stocks. About wealth creation through the transformation of ideas and materials into useful things that make for a better quality of life. He saw engineering as the skeleton of our civilisation, transport systems, infrastructure, buildings, warmth, light and comfort. Few could have attended the event without the efforts and ideas of engineers getting them there. He also explained how the terrorism of September 11th calls for a new gobal-order, a new framework for acceptable standards of safety in business, in place of business and in transport. He underlined how it is engineering that will answer this challenge.
As a medic understands the way the human body works and can ‘feel’ injury and pain, so the Engineer can ‘feel’ the way things work. Persig captured this so powerfully with his bikers in the heat of the desert in his famous novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The one is able to sense the initial slight seizure of a piston, to understand to slow down, to let the oil do its job, leading to the freedom to travel on. The other bloke has no such ‘feel’ for his machine, leading to breakdown and failure. An engineer is able be ‘in’ a situation which does not exist and from ‘within’ this situation rigorously analyse, define and make it happen.
Engineering is about listening, getting the idea across, operating the wheels of power and motivating people.
These are not the images of engineering put across by career advisors and the profession looses out as a result.
What do we need to do?
We need to co-ordinate or bring together the multitude of initiatives and to ensure that the message is both right and put across in the right way. We need our university engineering departments to have a critical look at themselves, to change their image and to bring themselves into the 21st Century.
We should find out what ideas relating to engineering capture the minds of young creative people. I believe they are attracted to ideas such as designing, energy use, conservation, making, and entrepreneurialism. This is engineering. We should make it known. These days the discussion of complex issues is part of the curriculum young people are used to. We need to get them involved in the ‘engineering debate’, discussing the issues that interest them and lead them to careers as engineers.
We need to be involving younger pupils. Eight to 12 year olds enjoy the challenge of understanding and creating buildings and engineering products. Primary school teachers have used engineering projects to help learning in the full school curriculum science, maths, English, art, geography etc.
We need to improve the computer based career guides, to bring in young people who like working with other people, creating, making life better rather than the present guides which are geared to encouraging interest only from select mathematics and physics stars. We need to gather interest from career orientated students who want to be engineers because they have an interest in people, in developing our world, touching the earth lightly and treating it as if we intend to stay, and in helping society.
Rod Macdonald
31 January 2002
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