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ENGINEERS are an endangered species. Unlike animals at risk, however,
the main worry is not their extinction but the threat their absence poses
to the world’s continuing technological development. As the supply of engineers
dwindles, countries face the prospect of economic stagnation. By the turn
of the century, there could be so few engineers at work that the major industrial
economies will be engaged in a fierce commercial tussle to secure the services
of those who are available. ‘The US will be able to pay high salaries to
make up its shortfall,’ says Mike Rice, a consultant who recently completed
an international survey of the engineering labour market. ‘It could act
as a gigantic sponge and soak up engineers from the rest of the world, which
will already be facing problems.’

Few analysts will predict the scale of the shortfall. They can forecast
by how much the supply of engineers will diminish but they cannot determine
the future demand for them. ‘How long is a piece of string?’ says Vivien
Marshall, head of education and training affairs at Britain’s Engineering
Employers’ Federation. Companies already complain to her that they cannot
recruit enough engineers and she has no doubts that the shortage will become
more acute. Manufacturers cope by accepting fewer orders or by quoting longer
delivery times. These effects can be measured. More critical issues, and
ones that take longer to appreciate among tables of statistics, are the
extent to which companies abandon the design and development of new products
and the way they make do with substitutes for engineers. According to Gordon
Higginson, chairman of the engineering board of Britain’s Science and Engineering
Research Council, a shortage of engineers will have a serious effect on
the economy. ‘Putting one’s faith in service industries and the financial
market is quite misplaced – anyone can look at a computer screen.’

The growing shortage is the result of falling birth rates during the
1960s and 1970s, and of the increasing reluctance of young people to pursue
an engineering career. Fewer births in Britain between 1964 and 1977 mean
that the country’s population of 16- to 19-year-olds has been falling steadily
since 1982 and will continue to do so until 1994 when it will begin to rise
again modestly. Similar trends exist elsewhere in Europe, North America
and Australia. According to Rice, the US faces a 25-per-cent drop in the
number of engineering graduates over the six years to 1993 while the comparable
ratio in West Germany is 40 per cent; like the US, however, West Germany
is rich enough to attract foreigners to make up its shortfall. He says that
demographic effects are not so severe in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea,
where birth rates did not fall. Against this background, the West’s industrial
economies have intensified their struggle to attract, educate, train and
retain people as engineers.

This month, Britain’s Department of Education and Science expects to
publish its first ever investigations into how young people perceive engineering
and why so many students drop out from engineering courses at universities
and polytechnics. The studies, carried out by the National Foundation for
Educational Research, come 10 years after the Finniston inquiry first drew
public attention to the enduring crisis in Britain’s engineering profession.
The Finniston committee highlighted the engineer’s mismanaged education
and training, lack of career structure, low salary and poor status.

In February, the US’s National Academy of Engineering presented for
the first time what it describes as engineering’s equivalent of the Nobel
prize. The award was made during the 1990 National Engineers’ Week, an initiative
that began in 1951 and is now celebrated in every state. The first international
Charles Stark Draper Prize went to Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, who invented
the microchip in the late 1950s. The pair received a gold medal each and
shared $350 000, the world’s largest prize given exclusively for an achievement
in engineering. According to the academy’s president, Robert White: ‘The
Draper prize will focus world attention on the important contributions of
engineers in the same way that the Nobel prize now focuses attention on
the accomplishments of scientists.’ But the celebration could backfire and
turn more young people away from engineering. The academy’s new award, named
after the designer of guidance and control systems for nuclear missiles,
is open to the charge that it reinforces the image of technology as the
progenitor of bombs, toxic waste and environmental damage. This view is
one of the reasons why there are fewer engineering undergraduates, says
Betty Vetter, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science
and Technology, an affiliate of the American Academy for the Advancement
of Science.

Australia, with an economy founded on mining rather than manufacturing,
faces a tougher task in persuading young people of the relevance and value
of engineers. Per head of population, Australia produces the world’s fewest
engineers and its most scientists. In 1988, there were about 3000 graduates
in engineering against 8300 in science. ‘This is the mirror image of Japan,’
says Rice, who is a director of EPM Consulting Group, an Australian firm
based in Melbourne. The 90 000 engineers in Australia make up just 1 per
cent of the workforce, compared with 2 per cent in the US. Rice predicts
that, on current trends, the ratio will be only 1.2 per cent in the year
2000; by then countries such as Singapore are determined to have at least
2 per cent of their workforce with engineering qualifications.

Historically, two factors have masked the low number of indigenous engineers
in Australia. Influxes of migrant engineers have compensated for local shortfalls
and, while the country survived simply on the export of raw materials straight
out of the ground, there was no need for a large bank of engineers to devise
competitive processing and manufacturing systems. But the lack of qualified
engineers will become more obvious as Australia tries to establish an industry
that can add value to the goods for export, as well as reduce the demand
for imports, and as the pool of migrants dries up. ‘A clever country not
just a lucky one,’ is the message of the premier, Bob Hawke and of the Minister
for Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins. Industrial automation,
such as computer-aided design and manufacturing, may have increased productivity,
but it has not reduced the number of skilled people in work. ‘The galloping
progress of technology’, as Rice puts it, demands more time from greater
numbers of qualified engineers. ‘Our situation at the end of the century
could be the same as that in the US in the early 1960s. . . we could be
trying to operate 21st-century technology with a mid-20th century workforce.’

The engineering profession distributes blame for its falling membership
on schools, where teachers are ignorant of applied science; on higher education
establishments, whose engineering courses fail to reflect the nature of
the job; and on industry, which denies qualified engineers the rewards afforded
accountants and lawyers. The profession itself is trying to counter the
demographic reduction in candidates by broadening its appeal. Among the
groups of people who find it difficult to pursue an engineering career are
women, ethnic minorities and mature students. The profession also wants
to make it easier for engineers to switch disciplines, from civil and mechanical
engineering, for instance, where qualified people are in less demand currently,
to chemical and electrical engineering, which is very short of specialists.
And it plans to encourage more bored or frustrated scientists to broaden
their horizons by switching to technology.

At school, the profession is trying to provide children with many positive
images of engineering. In the US last year, the National Academy of Engineering
distributed more than 50 000 copies of a glossy brochure depicting outstanding
achievements that it says have enhanced human welfare since 1964, when the
organisation was founded. Among the 10 selected achievements are the landing
on the Moon, the development of microprocessors and advanced materials and
the birth of biotechnology. The academy provides inner city schools with
funds for science books and equipment and it has begun to sponsor ‘foundation
of engineering’ courses that stress the importance of the discipline of
engineering as an entity, separate from and different to science.

In Australia, the Institution of Engineers is trying to persuade the
media to give technology the same prominence afforded science. It also wants
the government to think more carefully before making policy statements.
According to Brian Lloyd, the institution’s vice president with responsibility
for education, the government talks about science all the time, even when
it means technology. ‘This is confusing for schoolchildren,’ he says. The
institution has campaigned to lift the standards of mathematics and science
teaching. One of its practical steps was to commission a mathematics text
book written by engineers with the help of teachers. Since its publication
three years ago, the book has sold well, says Lloyd. ‘We are very critical
of schoolteachers but they respond when they have the information.’

Responsibility for spreading the word in British schools rests primarily
with the Engineering Council, established in 1981 as a consequence of the
Finniston report, to set standards for the education, training and experience
of engineers. One of the council’s most ambitious initiatives, launched
last year, is the Neighbourhood Engineers scheme. This aims to appoint three
or four practising engineers or technicians to every secondary school in
Britain, as advisers. About 6000 schools could be involved. The scheme is
partially up and running in 8 of 19 designated regions; in one region, Merseyside,
the project is already in full swing, says Ron Kirby, the council’s director
of public affairs. He wants more money from industry and government to set
up a comprehensive database that will enable the council to operate the
scheme nationwide within two years. Bemoaning the public’s ingrained image
of engineering as the dull, dirty, labour-intensive end of industry, Kirby
says that Neighbourhood Engineers will become the ‘flagship to change the
culture of the country’.

Children are not motivated at school to follow engineering, says Vivien
Marshall of the employers’ federation. She hopes Britain’s national curriculum
for schools, whose phased introduction began last September, will make a
difference, but she is not convinced. The curriculum stipulates that every
child in a state school must be taught science, as one of three ‘core’ subjects,
and technology, as one of seven ‘foundation’ subjects, between the ages
of 5 and 16, the period of compulsory education. Marshall fears, however,
that schools will still be able to ‘dilute’ science and technology timetables
with alternative subjects from the age of 14. A linguist by training herself,
she says that schools could decide to emphasise the teaching of the humanities
as they have done in the past. During the two crucial learning years between
the ages of 14 and 16, children are likely to be encouraged to study a second
modern language or classics, which are subjects they can pick up with ease
later, she says. ‘They will miss out on their grounding in science and technology.’

The effects on higher education of this bias are becoming more evident,
says Gordon Higginson of the SERC’s engineering board, with the number of
applications for undergraduate places on engineering courses not rising
as quickly as the demand for places generally. He couples the lack of interest
in engineering with a similar one in physical sciences, subjects that also
help to increase the pool of technological expertise. He says that the demand
in Britain for courses in law, which is the most popular single subject
for school leavers, is now more than the demand for mathematics, physics
and chemistry courses combined.

According to Higginson, schools tend to encourage their pupils to pursue
courses in mathematics, physics and engineering only if the pupils are well
qualified academically in these particular areas; otherwise they are advised
to look to the humanities. He doubts that the converse is true: ‘How many
poor classics scholars are encouraged to switch to science or technology?’
He insists: ‘Engineering is not downmarket science . . . but there is room
for the less academically able.’

Higginson questions the notion that science is much harder to learn
than the humanities: ‘I don’t know if this is inherently so or the result
of poor teaching.’ History and geography teachers are often very highly
qualified, he says, whereas, with science, the biology teacher is frequently
pressed into taking the mathematics or physics class. He also refutes the
view that science and technology are arid subjects, to be learnt by rote,
with less scope for the imagination than the humanities: ‘A more philosophical
approach (to the teaching of science and technology) is a good idea.’

Dropouts with false expectations

According to Noel Entwistle, professor of education at the University
of Edinburgh, very few teachers have experience of applied science and many
others share the public’s low opinion of engineering. One result, he says,
is that many students start engineering courses for the wrong reasons and
abandon them when the courses fail to live up to false expectations. Last
year he completed an investigation into the dropout rate in Scotland. With
a modest budget from the Scottish Education Department, his team focused
on first year students on the electrical engineering courses at three polytechnics
and two universities. Entwistle recorded that 21 per cent of the students
did not begin a second year; this meant that 25 per cent were unlikely to
complete the full course, which is almost double the dropout rate of other
departments. He blames both the students and the design of the courses.
Students had ‘no idea what electrical engineering was about or what the
courses entailed,’ he says. ‘There was more physics and maths than they
expected, and they expected to hear more about professional problems of
relevance than they did.’ Students complained that they were given far too
much factual information, much of which would be out of date before they
started work. They said that their timetables were completely filled with
lectures, laboratory work and tutorials; there was no time to think or for
background reading.

Entwistle’s lasting impression is that the ‘experience of being an engineering
student is not an enjoyable one’. His findings echo beyond Scotland. Overall
in Britain, the proportion of undergraduates that completes courses in engineering
and technology is among the lowest for any discipline. At the end of the
1988 academic year, the most recent for which figures are available, the
ratio was 83 per cent against at least 90 per cent of undergraduates in
social studies, business studies, languages and humanities. In Australia,
although dropout rates are generally high, the ratio is 55 per cent and
this is lower than in other disciplines. According to Bill Rourke, chief
executive of the Institution of Engineers, universities set entry standards
too low and they fail to match the career to the expectations: ‘We have
a wide gate in and a narrow gate out.’ This is the mirror image of Japan
where 95 per cent of engineering undergraduates complete their courses successfully,
he notes. Brian Lloyd, the institution’s vice president with responsibility
for education, says Australia’s engineering schools have difficulty attracting
applicants and so must open their doors as wide as possible.

Both agree with Entwistle that engineering courses are far too packed
with facts. Entwistle says that what students need to learn is ‘how to acquire
information and how to use it’. Marshall endorses this view. Engineering
departments with little contact with industry overload their courses and
overemphasise theory in an effort ‘to produce graduates that are useful
from day one’, she says. This is not what industry wants. In general, says
Marshall, industry is after graduate engineers with a broad base of knowledge,
who are versatile and can communicate.

Marshall admits, however, that the faults do not lie entirely with the
universities and polytechnics. ‘Managers (in industry) often don’t know
what they need ..and they tend to over-specify,’ she says. Graduates end
up doing jobs that should be done by less qualified technicians; and technicians
can be asked to tackle work that is beyond their capabilities. Such mismatches
mean industry is wasting resources and putting its reputation on the line.
Graduates are not stretched enough intellectually and they become bored;
overstretching technicians is dangerous. American researchers maintain that
the problem lies in the very loose definition of the term ‘engineer’. According
to the National Research Council in a report to the National Academy of
Engineering, Education and Employment of Engineers: a research agenda for
the 1990s, employers ‘characterise their engineering work force according
to their employees’ functions rather than by consideration of the employees’
training’. They should learn why young people become engineers and what
motivates the engineers already employed, says the report. ‘Lacking a consensus
of who an engineer is and of what skills and knowledge an engineering graduate
brings to the job could lead . . . to inept management and inefficient use
of engineers.’

The way that employers use engineers is one of six major areas of research
into the careers and training of engineers proposed by the Institute of
Manpower Studies at the University of Sussex. Announcing its plans in March
on behalf of the joint committee of the Economic and Social Research Council
and the Science and Engineering Research Council, the institute said that
investigations are also needed into how easily engineers can move from one
discipline to another; the extent of the continuing education and training
of engineers; the effect of past initiatives on the supply and quality of
engineers; the usefulness of postgraduates; and how international attitudes
to engineering compared. The institute, which uses the 1980 Finniston report
as its benchmark, aims to stimulate and inform discussion among the engineering
community. It wants to help to devise a new programme of research ‘directed
at providing answers to real questions, rather than reinforcing perceptions
and quantifying the scale of recognised problems’.

Industry has begun to take its responsibilities for engineers more seriously.
In Australia, the process has been a slow one: ‘Industry is ignorant of
the need to employ engineers,’ says Lloyd. The government has helped to
change attitudes by introducing tax concessions on company budgets for R&D
and with plans for an industry training bill. This bill, if it becomes law,
will require all enterprises to spend not less than 1 per cent of their
payroll on training employees; the ratio is expected to rise to 1.5 per
cent within a few years.

In Britain, there is growing collaboration among the profession, academe
and industry. In 1985, as the government squeezed education budgets tighter,
the trio won funding for an additional 5000 places in higher education for
engineering and technology courses. Three years later, it secured more money
for new courses, described as Manufacturing Systems Engineering, that would
provide graduate engineers with a broader base of knowledge for work in
the manufacturing industry. This move away from giving students training
in a specific discipline has developed further. Last October, pilot schemes
to test a new multidisciplinary degree began at the University of Durham
and at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham. If there is a demand, the courses
will also be offered by the universities of Southampton and Cardiff, and
the polytechnics of Portsmouth and Sheffield. The Integrated Engineering
Degree Programme, which has a curriculum embracing civil, electrical, electronic,
manufacturing and mechanical engineering, has three main aims: to emphasise
the interdisciplinary nature of engineering; to make a career in engineering
more accessible to those without traditional qualifications; and to enable
graduates to change their minds about the particular field of engineering
they want to enter, in response to new interests or job opportunities.

Producing the sort of graduates that industry needs is an important
step in narrowing the shortfall in engineering expertise; the next step
is to hold on to them. Salaries, though rising sharply and status with them,
remain a considerable disincentive to a career in engineering. Industry
now tends to pay enough to satisfy new graduates, but it fails to maintain
these high wage levels. Compared with earnings in law, accountancy and even
the media, those in engineering go up on a lower gradient. And unlike other
employers, industry seems to take a short term view and to regard its engineers
as a commodity, raising or lowering salaries in line with demand.

Despite the anticipated shortage of engineers later this decade, salaries
in the US are currently falling across all grades of the profession. According
to Richard Ellis, director of the Engineering Manpower Commission of the
American Association of Engineering Societies, between 1987 and 1989 earnings
fell 5.5 per cent in real terms for new graduates, 5 per cent for engineers
with 10 years’ experience and 2.2 per cent for engineers with 25 years’
experience. Cutbacks in military spending may account for the current surplus
of engineers. In a special report published in December 1988, Science and
Technology Resources in US Industry, the National Science Foundation recorded
that the US, followed closely by Britain and France, spends more on military
R&D as a percentage of gross national product than either West Germany
or Japan. ‘These two countries put virtually all of their R&D efforts
into non defence projects, which generally have a greater capacity to expand
the economic base; the same two countries also had the fastest economic
growth rates (as measured by productivity changes) over the past 21 years.’

According to the NSF report, industry employed 80 per cent of engineers
in the US in 1986 and of these, 18 per cent worked on military projects.
With more than 300 000 engineers with expertise in military technology,
and almost 80 000 scientists working alongside them, wondering about their
prospects in the era of glasnost, industry has taken the initiative and
reduced its wage bill.

But money is not the only thing, not even for engineers. Providing continuing
education and professional training and developing structured careers to
the top tier of management are essential ingredients in companies keen to
keep staff. According to John Rice, head of training at Rolls Royce, the
firm’s engineers can choose a managerial or a professional career, or a
mixture of both, without worrying about the consequences for their future
status and earnings. The idea is to develop and retain talent in the company,
says Rice. ‘We take people on for a career, not just for training . . .
and tailor career development to the individual.’ New graduates join a training
programme that can last up to two years. During this time, they pick up
the basic skills of the workshop and drawing office, learn what is meant
by teamwork and undertake assignments in different operations of the company
that help them to decide where they want to begin their first, real job.
Further training programmes, which cover communication and leadership skills
to the management of time and resources, become available to them as they
move into supervisory posts. Rolls Royce also sponsors a course at the University
of Warwick, the integrated graduate development scheme, that aims to give
people in work the opportunity to continue their education in line with
the needs of industry.

While such initiatives will help to make engineering a more attractive
career, they cannot compensate for a shrinking supply of eligible candidates.
What the industry needs to do is to broaden its appeal. The move to develop
courses for mature students and the trend towards seeking graduates with
broad based, rather than specific, knowledge encourage people with qualifications
in other disciplines to consider engineering as a career. Planners in the
US are investigating another tack. According to Betty Vetter of the Commission
on Professionals in Science and Technology, women and several ethnic minorities
are under represented in engineering. For five years, she says, women have
made up just 15 per cent of the profession, while the Black, Hispanic and
Amerindian minorities, which comprise 18 per cent of the US’s population,
still provide only 6 per cent of the country’s engineers. Among industrialists
concerned by the statistics is Solomon Buchsbaum, executive vice president
at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Addressing last September’s National Conference
on the Advancement of Research in New Orleans, he said: ‘Clearly, women
and minorities are grossly underutilised in science and engineering. Ways
must be found to attract both groups into technical careers – particularly
women, both white and black, who currently are the largest group of degree-earners
in college.’

In Britain, the ratio of women engineers has risen from 7 per cent in
1985 to just 12 per cent last year. Later this month, as part of a continuing
drive to make careers in engineering attractive to girls, the Engineering
Council will stage a one-day conference, sponsored by IBM, to investigate
the recruitment of women into technology. The meeting is aimed at teachers,
careers advisers and employers. In Australia, the profession is having even
less success. Despite a major campaign to improve the image of engineering
in girls’ eyes, still fewer than one in 10 engineers in the country are
women. The campaign, Women in Engineering, began in 1986 with a federal
government grant of A$70 000 (around Pounds sterling 35 000) per year for
three years; support now comes from the private sector. According to Helen
McGregor, one of the campaign’s co-founders, there has been a significant
increase in the number of women studying for a career in engineering. At
the University of Technology, Sydney, where she lectures in humanities in
the School of Mechanical Engineering, the ratio of female students has risen
from 3 to 4 per cent in 1986 to about 9 per cent last year. She admits,
however, that further increases in the ratio are likely to be small.

This news comes as no surprise to Sharon Beder, an environmental education
co-ordinator at the University of Sydney. She blames the way that engineering
has been portrayed in the past and the people that still dominate the profession
as a result. For the most part, she says, engineering attracted those who
‘like to deal with things rather than people; dislike ambiguity; like certainty
and order; have a narrow range of backgrounds . . . introverts’. Beder was
once a practising civil engineer. She says that if engineering were portrayed
as it really is, as an interdisciplinary subject that involves people, service
to the community, negotiation and compromise, entrepreneurial skills and
exciting challenges ‘it would be a much more attractive option for women
. . . and a lot more men would be attracted too’. And perhaps engineers
would not be quite so endangered.

Further reading New Pathways in Engineering Education by Brian E Lloyd
and others, EPM Consulting Group, 13 Connor Street, Brighton East, Victoria
3187, Australia. Price: $40, US and Canada; Pounds sterling 27, Britain.
The Engineering Profession 1990, edited by Linda Parkin. Published by Ivanhoe
Press, Kings Meadow, Ferry Hinksey Road, Oxford OX2 0DP, England. Price:
Pounds sterling 5.95. British Engineering: Employment, Training and Education.
Published by the Engineering Industry Training Board, EITB Publications,
PO Box 75, Stockport, Cheshire SK4 1PH, England. Price: Pounds sterling
20. The Performance of Electrical Engineering Students in Scottish Higher
Education by Noel Entwistle and others, Department of Education and TLA
Centre, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Science and Technology Resources
in US Industry, special report NSF 88-321. Published by the National Science
Foundation, Washington DC 20550, USA. Education and Employment of Engineers:
a research agenda for the 1990s. Published by National Academy of Sciences,
2101 Constitution Avenue, NW – Room GR 402, Washington DC 20418, USA. Women
in Engineering by Ruth Carter and Gill Kirkup. Published by Macmillan Educational,
4 Little Essex Street, London WC₂R 3LF, England. Price: Pounds
sterling 30 hardback, Pounds sterling 8.95 paperback.