Last year, James Dyson spoke out about the shortage of engineers in the UK. What followed was many unemployed, underemployed and redeployed engineers being understandably annoyed at his comments....in fact they were fuming, especially as he'd moved his factories over to Malaysia further reducing the number of engineering jobs available. If you don't know who James Dyson is....take a look at your vacumm!

To be fair, Dyson's not the only business owner to ship manufacturing out of Britain, nor the US, Canada, Germany, Australia etc, etc. James said that the problem in the UK is that whilst the British universities have brilliant engineering courses, they're full of international students and so aren't 'British'. Is this a problem, well yes it is if you want to build a country with solid engineering and innovation structures. You can't do that if all your engineers have gone home to India or China!

Around 71 per cent of available British engineering jobs are the skilled technical roles (skilled hands-on workers) and 20 % of employers are now hiring migrant workers to fill vacancies. So it seems that rather than there being a shortage of engineers, there's a shortage of the right type of engineers. When we think of 'engineers' we tend to think of the university trained engineers who are eligible to be members of a professional body such as Engineers Australia, but people who do engineering tradework are also called engineers. Perhaps this shortage of 'engineers' is the same sort of skills shortage we see across all of the trades.

Dyson also talks about struggling to find the 'brightest and best' engineers and that 40 % of companies also have trouble finding the right graduate recruits.  Not wanting to sound cynical, but maybe in searching for the 'brightest and best' graduates, what they're really after is a skilled and experienced engineer they can pay at new graduate rates!

There's a lot of talk about science exams being dumbed-down and if this IS the case, then I'd hate to have been at school in the 70's as I  haven't found anyone at school who's managing the workload of studying the sciences.  Even with the tough workload,  the amount of students taking science and maths subjects is improving. The trouble is, that the numbers studying science and engineering at unversity is still quite poor. In 2007  only 6.2 % graduated in engineering in the UK, and 8% in Australia.  Whereas  Germany produced 12.8 % engineering graduates and Singapore 40%. Engineers Australia estimates there's a shortage of about 20,000 engineers in Australia and its CE, Peter Taylor, says the situation is now so critical that we must  make maths and science lessons more interesting to encourage more students into engineering. Dyson believes the brightest and best are being diverted from engineering into careers which pay a lot more.
^{Brilliant German engineer (you can tell by the egg head)!}
One of the big issues is that everyone can be called an 'engineer' even if you just screw a nut on a car tyre. Not so in Germany though, only professional university trained engineers can be called engineers there, in fact they're called 'Herr Doktor Engineer' This might be why engineers in other countries do not have the same sort of respect as found in Germany. Even in the US, engineers are paid good wages and are appreciated for the work they do. Engineering is one of the hardest degrees to do, it has high workloads, long hours and if there's little kudos or pay at the end compared to accountants or lawyers, then no wonder our best are leaving the industry in droves. Exactly the same can be said for science, except their rates of pay are MUCH worse!

So what's the solution? Well, as usual there's people trotting out the usual 'make science classes more interesting' etc. But our best won't be attracted to science and engineering if the jobs aren't interesting, secure AND well paid. That takes  solid investment from the government and business owners like James Dyson to start taking on more graduates, training them and maybe looking at tempting back the engineers already out there...those doing something a little better paid than science or engineering!  

As Sir John Rose, chairman of Rolls Royce said, 'anyone clever enough to be an engineer knows he'll make more money doing something else'. This we need to change before it's too late!
  
Sources:   http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/education-to-tackle-shortage-of-20000-engineers-in-australia/comments-e6frea83-1225907964866
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1313284/As-Vince-Cable-says-t-afford-cap-immigration--We-fantastic-universities-They-turn-great-engineers-Why-British.html