A group proposing the UK’s first new university in 30 years believes it’s time for a revolution in the way we teach engineering
The engineering skills problem isn’t going away. Despite the efforts of various outreach programmes, publicity campaigns and government initiatives, the number of businesses complaining about the quality and quantity of engineering graduates remains stubbornly high.
While the number of engineering students has grown in line with the wider take-up of higher education, the latest skills survey from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) found around 40 per cent of engineering firms struggle to recruit graduate engineers, with 54 per cent saying graduate skill levels did not meet reasonable expectations.
So is it time for a revolution in the way we teach engineering in the UK? A group proposing to build the UK’s first new university in 30 years believes so and plans to initiate just that. Called the New Model in Technology & Engineering (NMITE), the private university aims to create a supply of work-ready engineers to support local engineering firms in its planned home in Herefordshire from 2017.
Although it is being advised by Bristol and Warwick universities, NMITE will eschew a traditional programme of engineering lectures. Instead it will teach students through a series of real-world problems supplied by businesses, a six-month work placement and an additional taught curriculum covering non-engineering subjects including arts and humanities to promote critical thinking and cultural awareness.
“Universities’ fundamental purpose is to teach you how to think,” said David Sheppard, co-leader of NMITE’s development team. “Being a fully rounded engineer is not just a matter of understanding the physics and maths… To be a really effective, innovative, problem-solving engineer, you need a broader base on which to operate. Most of the problems coming down the track are going to need an interdisciplinary approach and that’s what we’re doing.
“But the teaching is also informed by industrial partners providing you with real problems. So rather than say ‘it’s week 13 of the programme; this is when we do the second law of thermodynamics’, the teaching is done by putting a problem on the table and using various engineering tools to try to find the solution.”
This approach is inspired largely by Olin College of Engineering in the US, a small private university founded in the 1990s that focuses solely on producing the leading engineering innovators of tomorrow. It’s a highly selective institution that’s been dubbed one of the 25 ‘New Ivy League’ colleges and reached number three in one league table of US engineering schools last year.
The hope is that NMITE can emulate this success in a way that both produces higher-calibre engineering graduates and attracts more people to the profession. “If you’re going to try to tackle the numbers, you have to look at new ways to engage people in the profession,” said Karen Usher, NMITE’s other co-team leader.
“Getting an opportunity to work for months if not years in an industry sector where you’re actually learning by working on problems in that industry hooks men and women into the sector and the profession… The engagement with that sector, the real understanding of what it is and what the work is about, changes how you think about the job hunt. It makes it more appealing… and you’re more engaged with the choice.”
The aim is also to use the broader curriculum to show students the sheer breadth of ways engineering can be applied in the real world, which, said Usher, could be particularly effective in encouraging women to start engineering careers.
“Part of engineering could be working for Oxfam and working with women’s microbusinesses to help them design new [water] pumps. [Demonstrating this is about] opening up and helping them to understand that the career of engineering is about problem solving, people management [as well as] the application of technical engineering.”
Although it’s not obvious how studying English literature will open women’s eyes to the variety of the profession, the model has certainly worked for Olin, where 50 per cent of students are female compared with the average of around 16 per cent in UK engineering departments. Usher said this is down to establishing a culture in which women feel welcome but also about broadening the admissions process.
As such, NMITE plans to recruit students without A-level maths and/or physics (subjects in which women are minorities) and give them adequate support to study the topics in remedial classes. “Why could we not look at a young woman, for example, who has studied biology, history and English and say if she’s got the right grit and passion and she’s prepared to engage with the maths that’s needed, could she not pursue engineering?” said Usher. Some traditionalists might be horrified by this idea. They might also be unsurprised to know that the neither of the people proposing this model have previous experience of engineering or engineering education in the UK (Usher is a human resources professional and Sheppard is a retired marketer and management consultant).
The idea for NMITE arose not from a desire to reform how engineers are educated, but from a local working group hoping to improve the economy of Herefordshire. As the county is one of the few in England not home to a university, the group decided founding one would increase the local skills base and attract investment and young people to the area. As many local businesses specialise in technology, particular in the defence, agriculture and low-carbon sectors, it was felt an engineering university would be particularly beneficial and the group set about investigating the best way to create one.
Despite this lack of direct educational experience among NMITE’s founders, the public reaction from the existing university sector has been positive. True, Warwick and Bristol are only advising NMITE at this time and have not yet agreed to award degrees for the new institution, as has been incorrectly reported.
Indeed, a spokesperson for Warwick said the university couldn’t yet comment on the viability of the venture. (A spokesperson for Bristol was willing to be interviewed but was unavailable before the deadline of this article). However, the fact that both universities were prominently involved in NMITE’s launch announcement suggests they are confident enough in its proposals to be publicly associated with them.
Other academics The Engineer spoke to were similarly positive about the idea and the source of its inspiration, Olin College. “It’s a very interesting idea to shake things around a bit as the UK engineering curriculum on the whole is quite traditional, said Catherine Hobbs, head of department for engineering at the University of the West of England (UWE). “I can understand how their aim to appeal more widely could be achieved by this really quite different take on engineering curriculum.”
One issue with teaching engineers to degree level while introducing both more practical skills and a broader range of academic subjects will simply be fitting it all in. NMITE plans to do this with working hours and holidays closer to those of a conventional company than a term-based university, a move that will be helped by the fact its lecturers won’t be balancing teaching with their own research.
It will also have the added bonus of drawing up a curriculum from scratch rather than accommodating the existing interests of its staff, according to Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, professor of enterprise and engineering education at Sheffield University.“We are trying to develop an interdisciplinary approach to learning and teaching but we haven’t got there yet,” she said.
The problem might come not from the teaching itself but the need for engineering degrees to be accredited by a professional institution in order to count towards an engineer’s chartership. “These guys will be starting at a disadvantage because you can’t get accreditation, generally, until you have some graduates, which gives you a three- or four-year run-in before you can say ‘this is an accredited programme’,” said Hobbs.
“The barrier for a lot of existing courses is that if you want to make a radical change to your curriculum you have go through the accrediting bodies, and they have a reputation for being very conservative and fiercely protective of their discipline, making sure you have particular subjects included.” However, this doesn’t mean that NMITE faces an insurmountable task. “Actually, if you look at the [accreditation] literature… it’s extremely broad and doesn’t go down to a very detailed level,” added Hobbs. “If I were them, I would be trying to work with the accrediting bodies now.”
Recruiting students without A-level maths or physics will also inevitably create extra difficulties that can really only be addressed by investing heavily in a high ratio of staff to students. And even then, there’s no guarantee it will work. UWE, for example, used to accept non-maths students onto its robotics degree and as a result recruited more creative people, but ultimately it wasn’t sustainable, said Hobbs. “It was really difficult to get people from a non-A-level background up to speed in three years… We had people who found it wasn’t for them because it was a very technical degree.”
Perhaps the biggest question remains whether this kind of curriculum will produce the type of engineers the UK needs. Education, after all, is not the same as training. It arguably shouldn’t be the job of universities to produce ‘oven-ready’ workers with the employability skills equivalent to several years’ experience on the job, but rather engineers with a deep understanding of fundamental principles that they can apply to a range of technical problems. If companies want engineers trained in the practical aspects of their particular line of work, they should arguably hire more apprentices and sponsor their part-time university study.
“Current knowledge is very important but innovation is occurring at a speed that has never happened before,” said Rodriguez-Falcon. “We’re training engineers for jobs that don’t exist yet that will use tools that haven’t been invented. So the most important thing is that they have the principles and the mindset to tackle problems they haven’t even imagined.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that practical assignments based on current real problems from industry can’t form the basis of study at degree level. Indeed, project-based learning is very common even at the most academic universities. What an increase in this type of study may do is produce a type of engineer that is more focused on specific company problems rather than the biggest engineering problems of our age, but ones that are no less important to UK industry. “Grand challenges such as energy and water require a whole spectrum of people from in-depth researchers to technicians, but day-to-day commodity projects require different engineers,” said Rodriguez-Falcon.
Ultimately, the UK’s engineering skills issue isn’t going to be solved by any single measure because the sector doesn’t require a single type of engineer. It needs more people to come through the apprentice route who know a company’s working practices inside out by the time they study degree-level engineering. It needs more top academic graduates to tackle complex technical and system-wide problems for the country’s most innovative firms. And it needs engineers who are prepared to go into small and medium-sized companies in quiet, rural locations such as Herefordshire, bringing new energy and ways of thinking with them.
“Everybody’s been saying this for more than a decade: the curriculum needs more women, it needs to be modernised, it needs to be more interdisciplinary and it needs additional skills to make young people more employable,” said Usher. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring industry and academia together, strip curriculum apart and say ‘how can we build a modern, sector-focused curriculum that’s fit for purpose and has the necessary quality?’”
This all sounds very good, but isn’t this just a posh apprenticeship?
I know it’s been said before but you have to inspire people and generate interest in engineering at a much earlier age which is the responsibility of schools because there is now little in the home environment which can be taken apart to ‘see how it works’ – I grew up with Meccano sets and model steam engines was always taking broken consumer goods apart (clocks, washing machines etc.). Also I used to scour the local tip for discarded bicycles and make my own from the bits or make electric buggies with motors from the aforementioned washing machines (with a long mains lead!).
These days the taking apart of a broken gameboy or games console won’t impart much information to a young mind to spark technical interest so career choices at university age are likely to be influenced by other factors such as ‘how soon will I be able to buy an Audi A4 or BMW 320’…
“[young people] are likely to be influenced by other factors such as ‘how soon will I be able to buy an Audi A4 or BMW 320’…”
I think there’s a lot of truth in this, not (necessarily) because everyone is materialistic but because of the burgeoning level of debt involved in engineering education. Right now you’re looking at around 56-60K of debt for a four year MEng and it’s probably no surprise to the learned readers of this website that to have any hope of paying this off before your children go to university you need to earn some serious money.
I just think too often people that say engineering is a great career move are older and spent their 20’s,30’s and 40’s in a society where they didn’t need to think about paying back university fees, lower house price to income ratios and dare I say a society where accountants, lawyers, IT-bods salaries didn’t completely outstrip their own.
As an aside, a few days ago their was a shameless plug for a career at Bosch on this website, So i did a bit of digging and couldn’t find any official stats on starting salary all i got was that it was “competitive” (incidentally in my experience when a company says its salary is competitive it very rarely is, if they weren’t embarrassed by it why wouldn’t they just say?). Through some grad salary compare sites I found it was 24K in 2012. I mean just take a look at any grad recruitment site and judge for yourself what sort of person you will get that has a numerate (not even engineering) degree for that salary.
There are some things that need changing in engineering education but i don’t think this college will do anything. I think getting more people in engineering apprentices and picking up skills that way is a good idea, but i don’t think it’ll be the savior of the industry. Too often the highly technical side is completely forgotten and if you look at science parks around the country such as Cambridge and Surrey they don’t need or want apprentices. I’m a fan of making the BEng the industry standard again and getting your company to help you with fees for a tailored masters or post grad certificate *if its really necessary for chartership*. I also find it funny how Bristol and Warwick are consulting on these plans, as an alumni from one of these institutions I know first hand how (surprisingly) so few people end up as professional engineers. Maybe they should look a bit closer to home before giving advice?
As part of our fees to institutions such as IMechE and the IET we employ policy advisors etc. I think we need to demand more of them and right now I don’t think they project the voice of engineers enough.
Nothing wrong with posh apprenticeships, jb. The UK needs more of that and fewer university courses dubbed by some as “Mickey Mouse degrees”. No, not media studies, those generalists “life sciences” degrees, to pick on just one subject area, that fail to delve deeply enough into any areas of learning, leaving their graduates all but unemployable.
If universities are prepared to play the game – as in the case of Warwick and its current work with Jaguar Land Rover, for example – all power to their elbow.
Are they, though, up to the task? Do today’s engineering academics have adequate understanding of the world of manufacturing? Can they recruit teachers with the hand-on experience of their subject that is essential for vocational education?
Robert Taylor might be pleased to learn that there is a thriving modern equivalent to the Meccano that we both, along with several Nobelists that I know, grew up on. It is called Lego. (Check out the Mini-Engineers.) Throw in the Raspberry Pi and you have plenty of things to amuse, entertain and educate budding engineers.
“Instead it will teach students through a series of real-world problems supplied by businesses, a six-month work placement and an additional taught curriculum covering non-engineering subjects including arts and humanities to promote critical thinking and cultural awareness.”
Really? That pretty much describes my university 30 years ago. We also had PE and two foreign languages.
Of course, learning engineering started long before university. We learned science in school, and DIY from primary grade one. And still, girls wanting to enter university had to work one year before university. Boys were covered by mandatory military services.
Part of university life was also the harvest. 2 weeks in September we were sent to help harvesting potatoes. In Winter we helped the workers to keep mines, factories and rail roads free from ice and snow.
So you didn’t get graduates who never got their hands dirty. And you got graduates who knew how life was “down there”.
Where exactly are these companies that are desperate for Graduates…? I have applied for dozens of Graduate jobs and every single one without exception has said that they have had an overwhelming response. I have a Masters and yet the majority of applications fell at the first hurdle.
This college will do nothing to help the situation. What industry needs to do is stop throwing its toys out of the cot and actually build constructive relationships with local universities. If you want up to the minute teaching you have to actually tell university lecturers what up to the minute is.
It also smarts to see they’re proposing to teach non-engineering subjects to make more rounded students. I have lived in four countries, I speak French, my favourite subject is actually history, I volunteer twice a week restoring steam engines, I’m in the local acting club. I love politics and economics, the environment and I know my food & drink.
Industry… Explain Yourself!
It is of vital importance to understand the fundamental principles and mathematics underpinning industry but is it necessary to be capable of determining the State Space model of a dynamic system for instance? Clearly the answer is No. Its only applicable to those with the specific need.
In my opinion graduates tend to come to industry having learnt dozens of highly specific engineering applications in great detail, most of which will never be utilised, but lack the big picture and understanding that’s vital to most jobs or when to apply the skills they’ve learnt.
A re-think of how we learn and what we learn is well overdue. We must instil in our graduates a far more coherent and confident understanding of engineering, perhaps as an art, rather than simply as a series of compartmentalised problems to be solved with matrices.
I repeatedly get electrical graduates who come for interview but don’t really get the basics. Too many who maybe able to work out the internal impedance of a transformer but who don’t know when they’re used and how to select them. I developed a real world test that requires them to link the principles they’ve learned up. With the exception of a tiny minority most cannot. Again they may be able to design an instrument from scratch but they don’t realise when or how to use the instrument in the first place.
The engineering they learn lacks context and seems to be backwards in approach. First understand why, when and how an instrument is used before trying to design one. First size and select a transformer before designing its coils. First understand why frequency convertors are necessary and how industry uses them before learning how they function.
Without this context, all these ideas remain abstract, ungrounded and disconnected. Put them together and you have an engineer.
I agree with the graduate. I have two engineering daughters-where are the jobs? The interview process is too long and throws out really good engineers at the first hurdle so that they end up getting non engineering jobs. They do not need to go through maths tests, ridiculous pyschometric testing. One of my daughters is dyslexic, but a really good engineer-she cannot get through the first timed tests on the internet application process-so much for access! Industry needs to sort itself out! These engineers are getting the degrees and either end up in non engineering jobs or go out of the country.
This is exactly the opposite of solving my current problem. There is currently too much emphasis on projects and far too little lecture time (lecturers’ time presumably being expensive). The result is that grads come out with woefully inadequate theory. I would be surprised if the theory I getoffered from an MEng Grad could be compared favourably with the second year of a BSc. Given that A levels are now roughly equivalent to O levels, an Engineering degree now looks as if it needs to be five years, and most of that in the lecture theatre, not Projects.
There are a lot of jobs in engineering, but that is very general lacking detail. For graduates there are a lot more people than jobs. It takes a long time in engineering to get to the position where there are more jobs than people to fill them. With a lack of people coming up to fill the jobs later due to there not being enough jobs then the industry gets stuck in this situation. There are a multitude of reasons that these skilled roles are unfilled and lack of people to fill them is only one. For the amount of effort and responsibility there are far more incentives to work in other industries. It is unfortunate that pay is low and you work in the middle of nowhere because engineering could really be good in the UK. It needs to rebuild itself and modernise to compete with other industries.
If there are more Graduates than jobs, then the only answer is to improve the quality of graduates and reduce numbers. We are frequently taking grads that we would prefer not to just to make our numbers up, and on occasion, we don’t even bother to fill our quota because the quality is so poor. Students are being ripped off by “Universities” peddling poor quality degrees, sacrificing Quality for the cash cow of Quantity.
The problem as stated in the IET survey: 40 per cent of engineering firms struggle to recruit graduate engineers, with 54 per cent saying graduate skill levels did not meet reasonable expectations. True. Our company has had to employ foreign graduates with post graduate qualifications as we are unable to locate UK engineers with at least the basic foundations of physics and maths. It seems as if UK students have been taught how to solve specific problems but not the underlying foundation.
The suggested solution of NMITE in Herefordshire is to supply work-ready engineers to support local engineering firms. This is apprenticeship, pure and simple. It would be astounding if it worked. It cannot lead to the engineer’s chartership.
NMITE plans to recruit students without A-level maths and/or physics. To me it seems as if NMITE feels that women are not proficient in these subjects and NMITE hopes that exposure to engineering will change their ability. It is not their ability that is in question it is their motivation to study a discipline that requires sacrifice in salary and status to devote long hours to work that they had better enjoy if they plan to progress in the field. The women who do succeed in engineering are well known. There is no conspiracy to keep women out of engineering so don’t set up a NMITE as an answer to a non-existent problem.
The claim that “the curriculum needs more women, it needs to be modernised, it needs to be more interdisciplinary and it needs additional skills” sounds like a recipe. It is pure PC speak that sets up a problem to provide a solution: NMITE.
The inherent aim of NMITE is not to produce graduate engineering students, or engineers, but apprentices. Considering the complexity of modern technology and advancement of physics and chemistry I am at a loss to know how NMITE graduates will be able to handle the future, modern problems of the 2030s to 2070s without a sound foundation and without the experience granted by attempting a graduate level degree such as the PhD.
Students gain experience by working in real world engineering firms during the academic year. Engineering students ought to use the summer break for employment in engineering. In Canada, for example, the Engineering Faculty of the University of Toronto has a break between end of April to the beginning of September totaling almost 18 weeks. This is the time most engineering students devote to working in engineering firms gaining valuable real world experience.
There are graduate jobs out there.
We’ve recruited two electrical grads this year for my office, across our unit about four or five: and we’re primarily known as a civil engineering outfit, though that’s changing. Across all units and divisions at least a hundred.
You need to look beyond the typical employers you’re familiar with and the roles with which you are acquainted.
Mechanical and electrical engineers of all hues are needed across so many industries. Consider the utilities, consider construction firms, consider consultancies, consider manufacturers of products that aren’t so sexy: even chicken processing needs some interesting processes and mechanical engineering.
We have struggled to find capable candidates, in the end we recruited one from Southern Europe and another from India. Generally speaking the very best candidates are always Brits but on average candidates from other EU countries tend to be stronger. Unfortunately I don’t work in one of those sexy industries so we can’t recruit the very best who get offers from every employer.
My observations & advice:
1. EU candidates tend to be far more methodical and systematic, they analyse problems more coherently.
2. British and EU candidates have similar technical knowledge but EU grads seem to have broader understandings
3. The best candidates who tend to be Brits, are fantastic – they seem to apprehend the science and the art of Engineering.
4. If you’re an electrical graduate, make sure you know your fundamentals, its amazing how many grads after 5 years of study don’t really get three phase systems. Make sure you know what the frequency of the UK power supply is and what the voltages are at single and 3 phase: you look silly if you don’t know these basics.
5. Finally don’t sit silently like a dummy in group exercises or in chats with different people. IF YOU’VE PASSED THE HR TESTS, GOT A REASONABLE DEGREE FROM A REASONABLE UNI AND KNOW THE BASICS, THEN THEY’RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN FIT IN TO THE CULTURE: NOT FULLY FORMED SPECIALISTS.
6. If you can’t hold a conversation with someone or get overly bashful in interviews then stop looking for a job, go and see the world, volunteer somewhere, get out a bit, broaden your horizons and meet new people.
Sounds perfect. I recently gained a degree in renewable’s. The name sounds great but in fact had little in the way of real work engineering and was more to do with project management and did nothing to prepare me for a career in the industry in fact I am now at a loss as to the jobs I can apply to. A waste of my cash if you ask me. A more focused approach to the different sectors of engineering is a must.
Graduates saying there’s no jobs.
Employers (whoever they are!) saying they cannot find graduates.
A government and established ruling elite who would not know engineering from flower arranging.
A shrinking manufacturing sector which is 10% of GDP, and 90% of that is foreign car companies using our skills to boost their own profits.
Academia of lecturers who have never been in industry or made anything or created innovation.
A Department of Business Innovation and Skills run buy guys with no experience of business innoavtion or skills.
A Technology Strategy Board which has wasted £0.5 billion a year for 8 years without finding a single headline innovation.
A mass of government Enterprise schemes which never produce any results.
A dying breed of old engineers like me with 50+ years of experience and skill, in construction, commissioning and design in manufacturing, in oil & gas, cement and process industries and no one to hand it on to.
Did someone say we have a problem?
“Given that A levels are now roughly equivalent to O levels” – this is very close to the truth: my brother is a private science tutor and he recently showed me a Physics ‘O’ level paper from the 70s and an ‘A’ level paper from 3 years ago: both papers had precisely the same question except that the ‘A’ level paper gave the necessary equations – the ‘O’ level paper didn’t, pupils had to remember them. The ‘A’ level paper was thus easier.
“Robert Taylor might be pleased to learn that there is a thriving modern equivalent to the Meccano that we both, along with several Nobelists that I know, grew up on. It is called Lego.”
I’ve always been aware of Lego but consider it second rate compared to Meccano: nowhere near as flexible and less aesthetically pleasing as it evolved from building bricks covered in studs, and yes I know Meccano is full of holes but this is often deliberately engineered into real artifacts to save weight!
i) At Uni in the late 70s, we had wall to wall maths and science which was very carefully balanced with lab classes and problem-solving tutorials. In addition we studied technical English for two years AND either languages or music for two years. So the ideas of ‘well-roundedness’, ‘context’ and ‘real-world application’ are nothing new. How did we fit it all in? We had full timetables, something rather alien to current students as Unis have reduced contact hours
and teaching semesters to a minimum.
ii) trying to teach science and engineering to traditionally non-mathematical students is nigh on impossible. As an academic I was involved during the 80s and 90s in a number of ‘transfer’ MScs which were carefully designed to move humanities graduates into science disciplines. Almost without failure, even modest maths became the insurmountable hurdle. So they ended up talking ‘about’ problems but were limited in being able to then solve them
iii) As a Herefordian, I wish them well and lots of luck.
Nath:
Hiring students from southern Europe and India (?!) is a pretty good indication that the salary/work/location on offer was not appealing to good engineering graduates. It is easy to find lots of graduate engineering jobs that *require* a strong academic background yet offer terrible money…