inel

In response to this statement:

The big issue, according to the report, is that young people do not display an interest in engineering. In part, the authors postulate, this results from the under-appreciation of the important work that engineers have done in the past and continue to do. Additionally, there is no famous personality to associate with the field.

Young people in Silicon Valley think it is pretty cool when I tell them I am an engineer. By contrast, many adults in Britain still conjure up an initial picture of me as a “grease monkey”—working under the bonnet of a vehicle, or repairing household electrical equipment. Young people generally have very little awareness of engineers’ roles. Professional engineers are invisible!

Teachers need help from engineers to explain the wide variety of roles an engineer can play and the breadth of projects engineers are involved in.

Maths and physics teachers may be more likely to recommend a student follow those teachers’ preferred single subjects than diverge into the wider field of engineering. Things might be different if there were such creatures as engineering teachers alongside maths and physics teachers at school … Not only do potential engineers get easily diverted to maths and sciences, without realising the potential for engineering graduates, students who are good at biology and/or chemistry (as well as maths and physics) are likely to be steered towards medicine.

Female students who are good at maths and science need an advocate to help launch them into an engineering career. After launch, the advice of an experienced mentor can be crucial for a newly qualified engineer’s success within the profession.

I have long wished I could figure out a way to get more engineers involved in helping in schools, as the two-way communication between industry and education would be more valuable than just a simple transfer of technical knowledge—it would introduce engineers to school life and teachers to engineers’ lives. Most volunteers in schools are female, and most engineers are male, so there are very few opportunities for overlap. As a woman engineer with three kids in middle school, I see this as a massive gaping hole that needs to be filled, somehow!

Many of the engineers I studied with went straight from University to management consultancy careers. So, we leak engineers along the career path … and once they have leaked out, they rarely return

In summary, I think it is not just a matter of public perception that needs to be changed. In parallel with reinforcing positive public attitudes, teachers and careers advisers need to be targetted and intensively educated by engineering companies and engineers. Only then can these influential adults begin to appreciate engineering career opportunities and influence students in positive ways. For example, a student who has good maths and physics skills, enjoys problem-solving, can be relied upon to make a valid individual contribution to a project, and can collaborate well in a multidisciplinary team could make a good engineer.

As an electrical engineer in Britain and America, I would suggest a few more electrically connected engineers (they all have other interests too):

Marconi of Italy.

Ferranti, who sounds Italian with a full name like Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, but was definitely British and could even make a good subject for a film (?)

William Preece of Wales.

Nikola Tesla is another striking engineer, though a bit batty to be used as a recruitment role model!

In fact, once I began looking for links to these guys in Wikipedia, I found this list of lists—Engineers by nationality—which could come in handy.