SKILLS SHORTAGE IN ENGINEERING? 15

[chris9]

A leading UK politician recently stated in a national newspaper that industry and academia needed to encourage more women into the engineering profession to address the skills shortage.

If indeed there were a skills shortage for engineering posts in the UK then encouraging women into the profession would address the issue. However, about 15 years ago stood many impressive buildings around the UK teaming with engineers. Now they have been demolished and replaced with retail outlets. The ones that are still standing are selling off land and down sizing.

The engineering industry in the UK is shrinking, engineering companies that have been trading for over a hundred years are closing down. British engineering companies are being sold to large multinational companies who often only wish to get their hands on the brand name before discarding the manufacturing base.

Markets are driven by supply and demand. Demand for engineers is so low that pay is very poor in comparison to most other professions.

Just where do politicians get the idea from that there is a shortage of engineers?

 

[ScottyUK]

In a closed, regulated environment such as law or medicine, the salaries are higher because there is a finite number of people who are qualified to practice in those fields and those who are not are legally prevented from doing so.

Engineering is not a closed environment in the way that medicine or law are, and thus anyone can claim to be an engineer. Whether that is the fault of the professional body is a different matter. They are probably guilty of weak and ineffective lobbying of the government, but only the government can actually change the law so that (in the UK) only a Chartered Engineer may use the title 'engineer'. The professional bodies can't do it. Until there is a change in legislation - which I doubt I will live to see - employers have no reason to raise engineering salaries up to the level of the legal and medical professions.

The problem is compounded by the growing number of unqualified (ok, barely qualified) managers who do not see the benefit of employing a professional engineer for £40k when they can give a technician an engineer's title, pay him £30k, and get most of the benefits, most of the time.



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If we learn from our mistakes,
I'm getting a great education!

 

[DrillerNic]

But at the same time Scotty- there are a number of people in public life dealing in health issues (especially more complementary and alternative health issues) calling themselves Doctor, with those $80 doctorates from dodgy US mail order colleges (that awful woman doing the healthy eating programme on Channel 4 for example).

Some people have suggested that the situation in the UK is due to the way that engineering started as a self taught profession.