A crisis of Engineers?   

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Lord Broers FrEng FRS has held the post of President of the Royal Academy of Engineers since 2001. Until 2003 he was also Vice- Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, a post he accepted in 1996. Prior to returning to Cambridge, he spent nearly twenty years of his career in research with IBM in the USA, working at the Thomas J.Watson Research Center in New York, the East Finskill Development Laboratory and at Corporate Headquarters.

Lord Broers has served on numerous national and international committees, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Foresight Panel on Information Technology and the NATO Special Panel on Nanoscience. He was elected
to the Royal Society in 1986 and became a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 1994.

Born in Calcutta, India, he was educated initially at Geelong Grammar school in Australia and graduated in physics from Melbourne University. In 1962 he graduated in electrical sciences from Cambridge, where he arrived initially as a choral
scholar.

I believe the crisis facing engineering has more to do with a failure to attract people of the necessary quality as opposed to being simply a question of numbers.

Q. Is the world facing a shortage of engineers/technologists?

A. The answer is, of course, not a simple one. Looking at it purely in terms of the numbers of engineering and technology graduates, I am not absolutely convinced that we are facing a serious shortage. What we are experiencing, however, is a shortage of really high quality people going into engineering, who have the potential to become what I describe as ‘creative engineers’.

So, yes, we are seeing shortages across the board, but what concerns me particularly is the shortfall in top quality people. By that I mean people capable of understanding the pure science and the potential of a ‘breakthrough’ concept,
and at the same time also having the capability to take that through all the necessary stages to a practical solution, and ultimately to a commercially viable product.

I believe the crisis facing engineering has more to do with a failure to
attract people of the necessary quality as opposed to being simply a question of numbers. There is a shortage even of engineers who can handle large and complex projects. To fulfil such demanding projects requires people from the top drawer,
in terms of intellect as well as management skills. And that is where real shortages are becoming increasingly apparent.

Q. Which sectors do you see as being particularly affected by a shortage of suitably qualified engineers?

A. If we start with software systems – which covers a pretty broad area – there’s certainly a shortage there. The same is true across energy and oil & gas. Specifically within the energy field, there is an almost complete lack of people who understand nuclear power. And as I pointed out recently in the Reith Lectures, nuclear energy is something that we are going to have to revisit. We need to assess what are the future options and potential technologies. Yet within the United Kingdom there is virtually no university with ongoing research programmes or the necessary expertise to under take this task.

Q. Why do you think this shortage of engineers has arisen?

A. Firstly, the lack of adequate incentives. Industry tends to pay its engineering graduates far too uniformly. You will find all too often that top grade individuals are paid only 20% more than the average graduate. As a result of which, industries which desperately need the best engineers are likely to be outbid by consultancies. This may be because consultancies are more willing to take the risk of paying more to hire in the best while, as a rule, industry has showed itself unwilling to take such risks.

That said, the United States is far more flexible in its hiring policies. I can recall back in the 1960s, when I was at IBM, competing with Bell Labs to get the best people out of Stanford. When word got around that graduates from MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were no longer applying to IBM, we knew we had a problem and that we had to fix it.

Companies that needed the top engineers knew they had to do that, and that they had to take the risk of investing in talent. Yet later on, when I moved to the UK and was head of the engineering depar tment at Cambridge, virtually nobody from industry lobbied for the best graduates. In the United States that happens all the time. But in Britain, the industries which need engineers still rely on the established ‘milk round’ for recruiting from universities. Engineering graduates or
students who are about to graduate are fully aware of this, as a consequence of which not enough are encouraged to go into the profession.

So I think that industry’s outdated recruiting procedure bears quite a lot of the blame. Also, the universities themselves are not making their engineering courses sufficiently interesting or up-to-date. As a result, only the top four or five engineering depar tments in the UK can attract people with top grades at A level. The intake into other universities has to include people with lower grades.

But the fundamental problem goes back even further, to the early specialisation in the UK’s education system, from age 15 onwards, between ar ts and sciences. If you don’t choose to do maths and physics then, it’s hard to change track later on. Also, engineering has an image problem, with engineers often being seen purely as ‘technical experts’, and this tends to drive the more able students to other options. I find very few students at top achieving schools who are committed to becoming engineers. Why? Because young people are asked to decide whether they want to be an engineer before they know what it really means.

Q. Is the shortage of engineers a universal problem, or are some countries more affected than others?

A. In some countries, such as France and Japan, there are certainly more students who wish to follow engineering as their chosen profession. There are greater incentives there, with engineers in France being paid better relatively than those in the UK. Then, looking further afield, there are huge numbers of engineering graduates coming out of universities in India and China, and this makes it very advantageous for large multinationals to source their R&D in those countries. Whereas it costs $1 million plus to fund a top creative engineer in the United States, the cost in India or China would be nearer $20,000. So yes, I see more engineering R&D work going there.

Q. What other solutions do you envisage?

A. In terms of industry’s approach to recruiting engineers, it’s really quite simple. You only need to pay a few people well from the outset for new potential recruits to see that there are real opportunities in engineering. If industry is finding it so hard to attract quality people, how come they haven’t let market forces get to work on the problem?

It’s also a question of the company’s visibility. A company like Vodafone tends to be able to attract really good engineers because they pay well, but also because they are highly visible in developing new products. And its development
programmes – which are just as, if not more important than research – are thoroughly international. Nowadays, any complex development programme has to be international in scope and include top quality people. Otherwise it’s hard to
build into other international networks and know where the game is at.

The engineering profession still has much to do on gender balance. In our schools, girls now outperform boys in all subjects. Yet most girls are brought up to assume that engineering and many of the sciences are ‘male’ subjects’. The wasted potential is vast.

Ultimately, it’s up to industry to attract more talented young people by making the jobs they offer more interesting. They should also give them more responsibility early on in their careers. Otherwise they will leave industry and apply their skills elsewhere.

I wish there were more hard data on why so many have switched out of creative engineering and gone into consultancies. From anecdotal evidence, the most common answer is that they found their job ‘boring’, although flexibility of employment
is another factor. There have been various government initiatives to improve the supply of engineering graduates, but that doesn’t help if subsequently they don’t work in the industry. It is a real problem, and there’s no simple recipe.
But it’s up to our industrial companies to get this one right.