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Picture: Birmingham Mail |
Just before leaving the office for a conference, I glance at the Daily Telegraph and notice
a letter from Sir James Dyson highlighting (not for the first time) the
critical need for more engineers and bemoaning the fact that he has struggled
to fill the 200 jobs on offer in his company this year.
Moments later, EngineeringUK's 2013 report The state of engineering arrives, hot off the press. It has the same message. Engineering companies are projected to have 2.74 million job openings between now and 2020, of which 1.86 million will need engineering skills. Satisfying this demand means, in rough figures, a doubling of recruits to the sector. The report also points out that the average starting salary of £25,762 for engineering and technology graduates is nearly 16 per cent higher than the average for all graduates.
All very timely, as I am off to deliver the
keynote speech at Engineer your future, the first STEMinism event for women
engineering students, hosted at the Shell Centre in London. At least I won't be
castigated for advising them to go into a dead end career, remembering
the time I was speaking at a construction conference in the late nineties. One
delegate was vociferous in his disapproval of efforts to encourage women into
the building trades "because they'll all lose their jobs when the
inevitable downturn comes."
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Warming up at Engineer your future |
The Shell Centre is humming when I arrive.
More than one hundred young women, selected from the 600 who applied to attend,
have made the journey from around the UK, overcoming floods, cancelled trains
and stringent Shell security. All are studying engineering in various disciplines, all are bright-eyed, articulate and keen to make the most of the day. Organised by Targetjobs, the event is sponsored by EDF Energy, Shell, TFL, TubeLines, Microsoft, Cisco, Caterpillar, National Grid and MBDA.
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Concentration |
My speech Motivation, innovation and self-preservation seems to go down well
and over lunch a stream of students come up to talk, with
questions ranging from the work/life juggle (balancing the demands of a two
year old son and a career) to concerns about a new course combining engineering
with architecture (will I be employable or should I plump for straightforward
civil engineering) to the best ways of helping mid-career women engineers to
progress.
Sitting round a table with a workshop group,
one young woman describes how she is studying engineering for all the reasons that I have
highlighted - the excitement, the wonder and the sense of achievement - but
says that the teaching at her top rank university has sucked all that out of
her. She has decided to go into management consultancy. In striking contrast
another waxes eloquent about her course. "It’s brilliant," she says.
"Really interesting and we work on real projects and I can’t wait for my
year in industry.”
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Tomorrow's engineeers |
Three others talk about how inspirational
their maths and physics teachers were at school, but many say that they had
little support and encouragement to take up an engineering career. This
underlines some of the dispiriting findings of EngineeringUK’s report. Whilst
87% of teachers agree that providing careers guidance is part of their
role, eight out of ten base that guidance on their own knowledge and experience. Even worse, 21% of STEM teachers think a career in engineering is
undesirable. And on top of all this, 49% of state co-educational schools in England did not send any girls to study physics at A level in 2011.
There is good news, however. EngineeringUK’s
two main programmes, The Big Bang Science and Engineering Fair and Tomorrow’s Engineers, are producing encouraging results. Impact evaluation reveals that
the proportion of 12 – 16 year olds expressing knowledge of what people in
engineering do has almost doubled, from 11% to 19.8% this year.
Moreover the likelihood of this group seeing a career in engineering as
desirable has risen year-on-year from 29% to 38%. Even more
importantly, of the 56,000 young people and their teachers attending the Big
Bang Fair this year, 54% were female.
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Delivering the keynote: Motivation, innovation and self-preservation |
As a non-executive director of
EngineeringUK I have direct experience of the Big Bang Fair and the
extraordinary buzz it creates with all ages. The event includes the finals of the National
Science & Engineering Competition, with its impressive and
determined young contenders.
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Jessica Jones, electronics inventor |
For the first time, the winner at this
year’s event in March was a woman student.
Jessica Jones and her co-winner Wasim Miah, both 17 and from St David's
Catholic College, Cardiff, devised an Optical Foetal Monitor that indicates to pregnant women when they are about to go into labour.
Jessica is now
studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Cardiff University. She is
also in the process of patenting a form of fibre optic sensing technology and
setting up a limited company to market this product. Recognising this youthful
talent, on 6 December at the IET’s Young Women Engineer
awards, Jessica was announced winner of the 2012 Intel
Inspirational Award for Entrepreneurship.
Back to the need for engineers. Sir
James Dyson thinks that more students should be encouraged to come to the UK to
study engineering and then stay here. EngineeringUK believes that we
should be growing our own, encouraging more young people - particularly girls - in the UK to stick with the maths and physics to go on to take up careers
in engineering.
One of the slides I show when
promoting women in engineering is a photo collage of the women who have
recently become presidents of
professional engineering institutions. I highlight the fact that they all run
their own businesses and also point out that we have yet to see a woman
president of an electrical engineering professional body. Looking at Jessica
and the other finalists at the IET, it will surely not be too long before that gap
is filled.
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