The UK isn’t the global industrial powerhouse it once was. One area where it’s an undisputed champion though is in producing top of the range wildlife and nature documentaries. Not so long ago, these were an excuse for David Attenborough to show us a parade of beautifully filmed sequences of exotic wildlife in their native habitats. With Planet Earth III, just finished broadcasting but still available via BBC on-demand services, the focus has switched dramatically.

Conservation isn’t just about preventing endangered species from going extinct at an alarming rate. The stories of these animals is inextricably linked with climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions. And finding alternatives to the rapacious techniques that are devastating habitats across the globe isn’t going to rely on naturalists; it’s going to need engineering skills.

One episode of Planet Earth III saw Attenborough illustrating the extent to which forests that have existed for millennia are being cleared to create land for agriculture, often not just to graze cattle for meat, but to grow plants to feed those animals, fuelled by growing demand for meat that is an inevitable part of increasing affluency in developing countries. Persuading people to switch to less carbon-intensive, plant-based diets is one part of the solution. The other, as Attenborough went on to show in a sequence very different from his genre’s usual clips, is high-tech vertical farms that use the latest in robotics and agricultural infrastructure to grow crops more efficiently and closer to where they’re needed.

If this is the future of making sure the world doesn’t go hungry, it will rely on engineering skills which according to new research by the IET are in alarmingly short supply.

In August and September 2023, The IET commissioned independent research agency YouGov to quiz more than two thousand engineering employers from all over the world about their current priorities and challenges around climate change. The focus was on what sustainability skills they believe are needed in the near future, how hard it is to recruit people with those skills, and how they are responding.

The results, published in the International Green Skills Survey 2023, are worrying. At least 80% of respondents in most countries surveyed say that they are concerned about the impact of climate change on their organisation. Less than 5% of companies across eight countries say they have all the skills to be resilient to climate change and a lack of skills is seen as the most common barrier to reaching net zero for engineering employers.

What do employers think is missing? Taking a quick tour of the world based on the results of the IET survey:

• Malaysia places the highest value on teaching soft skills to provide more high-quality engineering and technology candidates for the industry. Companies in Malaysia also see a lack of leadership skills as their biggest barrier to achieve net zero.
• In China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia respondents most commonly tend to think that new entrants to the workforce should have certain mindsets or ways of thinking: 92% in China think new entrants should have whole-systems thinking, 89% in Brazil think they should have an agile mindset, and 78% in Saudi Arabia think they should enter the workforce with innovative thinking.
• Germany is the country least likely to feel that new entrants to the engineering workforce should already have technical/engineering skills.
• Overall, the most commonly selected skills countries struggle to find are technical or engineering skills (UK, Malaysia and Australia) and solving complex problems (India, China and USA).
• Germany is the country least likely to expect people to enter the workforce with a specific skill set. Germany has its biggest challenge in its external recruitment to find those with specialist digital skills/knowledge, with its second biggest challenge being leadership and management skills.

Across the globe though, mindset and different ways of thinking are seen to be as important as traditional skills when it comes to preparing young people to enter the workforce. Most countries selected technical and engineering skills as their top answer to what they expect new entrants to the workforce to have, but for those that didn’t, it was innovative thinking (Saudi Arabia), an agile mindset (Brazil) and whole systems thinking (China) which had the most responses.

Echoing companies’ claims that, other than specialist environmental skills, it’s soft skills which are missing but urgently needed to be resilient to climate change, ‘technical skills’ were less likely to be selected as missing compared with mindset-related skills.

For the engineering sector, the root of any skills gap is likely to lie in the school and university education system. Industry perception of how effective their country’s education system is in preparing young people for work tends to mirror their opinion of how appropriate the skills it equips them with are.

The UK is the only market where respondents feel that the education system does not prepare its young people well for work in their industry, with just 35% of respondents saying it does. This is far lower than all other countries, (the next lowest being Malaysia at 64%). At the other end of the scale, Chinese respondents have the most confidence in their education system, at 95%, and among the lowest numbers missing key skills as they enter the workforce.

There’s consensus, at least, about what needs to be done. When asked where technology and engineering education at a university level needs to improve in order to provide more high-quality candidates for industry, nearly every country’s top three most selected answers included collaboration of some kind with industry.

Talking points

As well as identifying trends and challenges, the IET’s report on its International Green Skills Survey 2023 makes a series of recommendations for global stakeholders. Regarding the international workforce pipeline, these include:

Collaboration between industry and academia is key to delivering graduates with the skills employers need, so businesses and academic institutions need to facilitate connections and opportunities between universities and employers. They should make existing pathways clear, help universities to create new ones where possible, and maximise the opportunities for students to interact with businesses.

What would you add to this? Read the full report on the survey and tell us what you think.

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