Interview: Enginuity Chair Professor Sir Jim McDonald on solving industry's skills conundrum

Throughout his career, celebrated engineer and educator Professor Sir Jim McDonald has played a key role in helping shape industry’s response to some its biggest and most pressing challenges.  Now, as the new chair of skills charity Enginuity (following a tenure as President of the Royal Academy of Engineering), he’s applying himself to a challenge which is particularly close to his heart: tackling the sector’s soaring demand for skills.

“The whole skills piece is very close to my heart professionally” Sir Jim - who is also Vice Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde - told The Engineer earlier this year. “The longer I travel in my career, the more I realise that fundamentally, the success of any business or any nation is the talent in the nation and in society.”

In recent decades there’s been no shortage of initiatives aimed at addressing this challenge, but whilst many of these efforts have been effective and successful, what’s been missing in McDonald’s view is a cohesive, overarching strategy.  “We’ve got lots of very active, high quality professional engineering organisations, but what we’ve lacked is coherence and collaboration and as a consequence the skills space has become quite noisy,” he explained. “It seems to me there’s a degree of a discontinuity and lack of coherent strategy in the skills domain. And that’s not because anyone’s doing anything wrong. It’s just that we’re not doing enough right together. I think what has been missing is a vision for the engineering profession.”