Peter Brooks said:

Is this shortage of people willing to join these professions, due to fear of being zapped?

My personal suspicion is that it's more due to the shortage of medium / large companies that can cope with taking on apprentices. Despite the various initiatives to promote apprenticeships in recent years it's hard to see how they can succeed without large enough employers who can devote sufficient resources to supervising / training them.

Hello Andy:

I am missing something in your response.

Why does training in such thing as solar panel installation or heat pump operation and installation, require an apprenticeship with support from a medium sized employer?

Here in Florida we have community colleges that have educational courses for brewing beer, professional cooking, solar panel installation, AC/heat pump maintenance, how to create secure IT systems etc. One signs up for a course and pays a fairly small amount of money for 3 -6 moths of "hands on" training. 

Peter

I think this could be a discussion thread by itself!

One issue, is that there seems to be a perception that there are easier ways to make money, it used to be that everyone wanted to be a professional sportsperson or musician, but it seems to be everyone wants to be some form on influencer these days.

The other is having opportunities. Yes, we have colleges that offer a variety of courses at a fairly small amount of money (but consider perception here, for some people that small amount looks significant).

You can find courses as a bricklayer, plumber, electrician, etc. But there is no guarantee that you will find a job after completion. So its a little risky to sink your own money, especially if you don't have a lot. And lets be fair here, the richer families will generally send their children to university (no guarantee of a job after that either).

Apprenticeships are the better option, as they pay a wage and the training is paid for. In the UK, large companies have to pay a tax which funds apprenticeships, which smaller companies can draw on. So effectively the training is free to the company (but not quite).

And this leads to the other problem. Many companies simply don't want to pay for training. They complain incessantly that school leavers don't have the skills. But someone has to provide those skills and you can't expect it to be entirely the schools as they neither have the resources or experience.

As a parent, I spoke with the teacher at my childs first ever school, what did they expect of a 4 year old. They told me, they wanted a child that was open to learning. They didn't expect the child to be able to read or write (ok, they wanted the child potty trained as well).

Companies need to have the same attitude, they need school leavers that are ready to apply themselves and ready for the next phase of learning. That might include numeracy, communication skills and a grounding in other subjects as needed. But any specific work skills should be taught by industry.

UK apprenticeships are regulated to an extent, the company is expected to provide training as part of it if they want to be reimbursed. Therefore Andy's point, you need a volume of suitable apprenticeships to bring in the new blood. Because the rest of the industry is waiting for fully trained people, and they will be waiting a long time.

Hello Mark:

A couple of additional facts about the US:- Most States (including Florida) have 529 programs (pre-paid college education funds) which can be opened when the child in born. The parents (or grandparents) can contribute money each year into the fund, which grows with time tax free, until the they are 18 years old and need it for higher education (whatever that can mean).

Using a Community Colleges (living locally at home) one can also get an AA 2 year degree, with guaranteed access to a State run University for another 2 years, for ones BS. 

Children start regular school at least one year later than in the UK. The US also had "Head Start" programs to get the young children socialized before stating regular school.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay  

Peter Brooks said:

Why does training in such thing as solar panel installation or heat pump operation and installation, require an apprenticeship with support from a medium sized employer?

Marks's covered quite a lot of the connection. Another I've always felt is that, without a company to sponsor / support / apprentice them, school leavers simply don't know (and never have known) what such jobs are about. I used to do a lot of STEM ambassador work in school, and something you find out very quickly is that vanishingly few school pupils, of any age, have a clue what any of the technical professions are - except games designer. And there's no reason why they would, they'll have come across teachers, doctors, nurses, shop assistants, hairdressers, ok maybe possibly car mechanics. But there's no reason in their day-to-day life why they would have any more than the vaguest awareness of what most technical roles involve. (Ditto for most adults!) Now when I left school in the 1970s this may have been less of an issue, for example near where I lived in London there was a whole road (the Great Cambridge Road) full of Thorn EMI factories. A school leaver may have had no idea what a job there actually entailed, but they knew you could "go there and get a job" - or maybe "go there and learn a trade", such places were big enough to vacuum up school leavers and work out what to do with them later. (Not this this was to last much longer as it turned out.) These days it feels like it's up to the school or college leaver to push into an employer by explaining why they will be an asset rather than a burden on them - when that school / college leaver is unlikely to know what the job is about in the first place.

So, together with Mark's points my belief is this is part of why you end up with issue - you can put on as many college courses as you like, but school leavers won't apply for them if they don't understand what they are, and they still won't help if those who do choose them can't get a job when they leave.

Which comes on to actually the main reason I wrote what I did. No college education alone qualifies you to actually work in any technical area, there's always on the job experience needed as well. Mark touches on the fact that employers want staff who are already skilled and experienced, and there's a really good reason for this - a typical (say) 3,4,5 person business often simply cannot afford to lose one of its staff supervising an apprentice (or trainee if you like), because they have the double whammy of paying the trainee who is not significantly delivering and their supervisor / trainer is now delivering less work. A medium / large company has a chance of covering this overhead, a small company is going to really struggle. And, of course, all kudos to those who do it anyway! 

So back to your original point Peter, my feeling is that pretty much any school leaver would be pretty horrified at the thought of working on something which could kill them if they touched it, and those that aren't probably shouldn't be allowed near it, but some will start a job where they will learn how to cope and even enjoy it (the job, not the electric shock!). The challenge is, who is going to give them that job? And how can we free up supervising staff to make more of those jobs available?

I don't think there's an easy answer to this in the UK at least, it's been a growing problem since the UK government decided to exit manufacturing in the late 70s / early 80s (and I'm neither criticising or defending that decision, it just was what it was). Personally I tend to feel that the most likely arrangement to work to start apprenticeships moving again on any sort of scale is that training (not just education) becomes much more college based, with students spending short duration placements across a number of local businesses, so that each business is not overly burdened with having to supervise them. But of course there has to be a short term payoff for the business for this to work. And there's still the challenge of attracting school leavers in the first place. 

Hello Andy:

I am well aware of the hollowing out of industry in the 1970's and the out-sourcing of (for example machine shops) functions to small "village" operations outside (example) Cambridge. One of my wife's family owned and operated such a one man village machine shop.

The hollowing out process is still going on with the Steel works in Wales, which will effectively eliminate the production of steel from iron ore and only uses "out sourced" pig iron.

I saw an article the other day that claimed if you remove assets created by "The City" the rest of the country becomes a 3rd rate country like Cuba. 

It is not a good view from here!

Peter 

Hello Andy: You mentioned being a STEM ambassador at schools. I assume this was an unpaid volunteer position!  Why did you do this?

I bring this question up because there appears to be a stigma associated with volunteering (not being paid) for helping out, in the UK at this time.

Fully retired engineers need to have a purpose in their lives and should be a good source for volunteers. I personally volunteered a couple days a week for over 15 years in our local hospital and learned a lot.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

Peter Brooks said:

I assume this was an unpaid volunteer position! 

Very much so - to the extent that I spent quite a bit of my own money on tools and equipment! Ok, here's the story, a few of us got together to enter Robot Wars (BattleBots in the US) in the late '90s, when it was huge on TV, and because we got known locally we got invited to take our "robot" into schools to talk about it. That led onto helping a school with their robot project, which then led us into finding out about a school spin-off (not televised) of Robot Wars which we decided to enter with our own children (who went to a very relaxed primary / elementary school). And next thing we knew we were running an engineering club there which was great fun. I ended up designing and running several inter-school challenges, working very closely with our regional STEM Ambassador co-ordinator.

I stopped mainly because more and more people (mostly ex-teachers) started doing the same thing professionally, and to be honest I got fed up doing something for free when the person next to me, doing the same thing, was being paid for it. Also, quite a lot of what I did was IET funded, however the IET decided to stop funding individual projects and target national activities instead (fair enough). Plus I really enjoyed working with 5-13 year olds, and 16-18 year olds, but found myself doing several sessions with the group in between who are - as any teacher will agree - challenging. 

(Just remembered, at the time I stopped I was also doing my Masters degree while at the same time trying to bring a major development project to delivery while at the same time restructuring our engineering department, having taken over from the engineering manager who was off with stress. I feel a bit better now about not being able to cope with other people's hormonal teenagers just then! I had two of my own at that time as well...) 

But mostly it was great fun and I'd highly recommend it, I spent an awful lot of my spare time over 10 years doing it, fortunately there's a tradition in our part of the UK of the work week ending at lunchtime on Friday, which gave an afternoon a week in term time to do this stuff. 

Peter Brooks said:

I bring this question up because there appears to be a stigma associated with volunteering (not being paid) for helping out, in the UK at this time.

If there is I'm not seeing it! I currently work 4 days a week, but I'm looking to move down to 3 if a can as I'm struggling to find time for work among the amount of volunteering I'm doing, the assumption amongst the sort of people I get involved is "why work when you can have much more fun volunteering" (but of course this is a self-selected group of a certain age and, generally but not always, past income).

What can create an issue is the attitude that people "ought" to volunteer (and, tbh, this can come across in the IET sometimes). Volunteering needs to be voluntary, persuasion and encouragement is good, "guilt tripping" definitely isn't.

The other conflict that regularly happens is between "professionals" and "volunteers" - rather like my example above. My wife's worked in the charitable sector for very many years, and I've also been involved in it in various ways including as a trustee, and it is an incredibly difficult balance. The charities can't survive without volunteers, but it's a management nightmare as volunteers can decide to do whatever they want. You see some professionals treating highly skilled and experienced volunteers like children, and some volunteers (perhaps in consequence) acting like it! 

There are plenty of us STEM Ambassadors around!

Many medium and larger companies now offer a small (really small) amount of paid volunteering time as part of their social impact. I don't think its a particularly new idea either, I can think of some companies that were doing similar things a couple of decades ago at least.

But I agree with Andy, volunteering is best if it is something you enjoy. The nice thing about STEM Ambassadors is that their is a variety of activities that pop-up and you can choose what interests you.

I don’t know why you have the impression that there is a stigma associated with volunteering in the UK. Others have mentioned the STEM Ambassador programme which is a huge and successful nationwide programme of about 28000 volunteers. Far from being something just for retired engineers, I have done this for most of my career, and my company encourages our apprentices to join the programme, as they are best placed to attract school and college students choosing their careers. Additionally, there are around 300,000 school governors in the UK, which is the largest volunteer group in the country. Engineers are valued school governors. And of course the IET has a large body of volunteers working at many different roles within the organisation. I take part in all three of these voluntary roles and I know lots of others who do too.
You asked Andy: ‘Why did you do this?’ For me, the answer is that I like to use my experience to help others, and they appear to appreciate it.

I don’t know why you have the impression that there is a stigma associated with volunteering in the UK. Others have mentioned the STEM Ambassador programme which is a huge and successful nationwide programme of about 28000 volunteers. Far from being something just for retired engineers, I have done this for most of my career, and my company encourages our apprentices to join the programme, as they are best placed to attract school and college students choosing their careers. Additionally, there are around 300,000 school governors in the UK, which is the largest volunteer group in the country. Engineers are valued school governors. And of course the IET has a large body of volunteers working at many different roles within the organisation. I take part in all three of these voluntary roles and I know lots of others who do too.
You asked Andy: ‘Why did you do this?’ For me, the answer is that I like to use my experience to help others, and they appear to appreciate it.

Lee Nelson said:

Additionally, there are around 300,000 school governors in the UK, which is the largest volunteer group in the country. Engineers are valued school governors.

And indeed at the same time that I was a STEM ambassador I was also a school governor. Incidentally, if you are going to run an after-school engineering club it's very useful if you are also the H&S governor! (Not that that was why I was the H&S governor, it was just an unexpected bonus.) And, as you mention IET volunteering, I was also an IET school's liaison officer which in turn resulted in me to being a LN committee member and events organiser.

However, I would re-iterate that in my experience the people who tend to volunteer do tend to volunteer for many different things at once. And then there are many others who don't volunteer for anything. So it is hard to judge quite what proportion of the population do volunteer. I'd say that all my friends do, but then that's probably why they're my friends, like minds and all that!

To drag this a bit back on topic, throughout the time I've been volunteering (in various roles) for the IET I've been hugely frustrated at the disproportionately high numbers of retired IET volunteers. Not to criticise retired engineers who want to volunteer, that's great, but as a mid-career engineer seeking professional registration wouldn't you like to see your peer group involved in the process? One of the things that put me off joining and registering for many years was the perception that it was an "old boys club". I quite passionately believe that we need to get more working engineers involved in the professional registration process so that it is very clearly a peer review. Now I'm aware that there's a level of hypocrisy here as I've never volunteered as an assessor / interviewer because I couldn't / can't work out how to fit it around the day job. That said it should be much easier now we have moved from face-to-face interviews to online so that assessors / interviewers are no longer having to give up a whole day to it (including potentially travelling). And anyway, PRA work is very easy to fit around a work schedule.

I am regularly trying to persuade my colleagues to PRA / assess / interview without success, and often the response is "maybe when I retire" - I really think we need to find a way to encourage more people to do it now. 

Hello Lee:

I failed to answer your question about my statement concerning there being a apparent sigma against volunteering in the UK.

When my wife and I decided to attack social issues by volunteering here in the US - I was greeted by scorn from my older UK based family members.

Recent UK roadside video interviews with people discussing the government plan for young people to either serve in the armed forces for 1 year or to do community service (volunteering), indicated the complete rejection of the latter option, by teenagers.

Here is the US, teenagers expecting to go into University are told to get a certificate showing they have completed 50 hours of volunteering, in order to improve their chances of being accepted, by their chosen University.  

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

I would recommend not confusing the response to a rather ill-considered policy proposal by an unpopular (with that age group at least) political party in the UK as a complete dismissal of community service by our youth. This idea lacks any thought to how it might actually be implemented (i.e., there are issues with the availability of resources) and is already down to 3 months rather then 1 year.

If the government was really interested in building more volunteering/civil service, skills and life skills, it would provide funding for the The Duke of Edinburgh's Award to make sure more of our young people have the opportunity to participate. If you achieve Gold you have volunteered for a minimum of 21 months. For Bronze, you have volunteered for 3 months minimum (but more likely 6 months).

Most schools and youth groups do offer the scheme, but there are limited places in those groups and there can be a not-insignificant cost involved which will put some off.

The one school in my area which generally achieves the worst academic results doesn't offer the scheme at all. So those children, who are already likely to be on the lower social scales and thus end up in trouble, lack the opportunity to participate via their school. That's likely due to school funding.

Comparatively, the local grammar school which already provides some excellent opportunities for its children, somewhat due to sizeable donations from successful former pupils (the sort of donation that builds entire buildings) offers the full scheme and has its own military cadets clubs as well.

The other thing about that policy was that they were already talking about picking the "best of the best" for the military placements and everyone else would need to do community service. The best of the best would likely be heading to university and if they were interested in a military career they could join after their degree as a commissioned officer.

Hello Mark:

Just for the record, I attended a Grammar school just after WWII as a result of a "leveling up" program for low income families developed by the Labour government.

While there, I joined the military Cadets club, so that I could legally operate (play with) portable transmitter/receiver radio equipment. 

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

Great for you.

However, these days the only way you get anywhere near a grammar school is by being top of the 11+ test because they are so oversubscribed. That means competing with many hundreds of other children who's parents have generally invested in private tutoring for the past one or two years (in some cases even more).

Less than 10% of the places are available for low income families, and that still requires achieving a specific score on the paper for which you will need to invest in some form of training to pass. In recent years we have seen content creep into the exam that is studied in secondary school. The 11+ is taken while the children are in primary school. Of course, as one of my friends pointed out, the private primary schools actually cover the 11+ content in their lessons to prepare the children for the test. But then when you have a class size of 10-15, you get through the mandatory content quicker.

Basically, unless you have parents with higher education, or the money to pay for tutoring (or at least the content in the exam that you won't be taught at school), you are unlikely to succeed. There will be exceptions of course. If you combine that with a primary that is generally failing (lack of investment you know), you have even more of a hill to climb.

Thus, when you look at the children at the local grammar school, for the most part you will find they come from privileged families or at least well educated ones.

Its also noted that a number of the applicants parents temporarily rent houses in the town whilst applying for the school, but once they have the place they move back. A few of my friends have done precisely this trick.

Hello Mark:

Yes I took the 11+ exam and came out top in my primary class of over 30.

Also had a one-on-one interview with the schools head teacher, plus pass the schools own exam.   

I was into electronics well before taking the 11+ test.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

I didn't. Not that we had the 11+ when I went to school, but the secondary school was very heavily "streamed" so there effectively was an 11+ assessment to decide whether you went into the GCE (old Grammar) stream or CSE (old Secondary Modern) stream. I was at the lower end of the secondary modern stream, where maybe some students may get some mark in a CSE assuming they bothered turning up and didn't actually set fire to the exam paper. 

I was one of the very few in my year to go to university (remembering it was a rarity in those days anyway), and I suspect one of even fewer to later get a masters, two institute fellowships two charterships and two further memberships, and let's face it, two somewhat successful careers in two very different engineering industries.  

While I'm sure some people can get correctly "selected" at 11 (or indeed in the UK 16, 18, 21 or any other critical age) my experience is that a significant number don't. 

So again dragging it back onto topic  in hindsight it's no surprise that given a somewhat messy secondary education following that initial mis-selection I got a pretty awful grade in my first degree - in particular I hadn't had a good enough grounding in maths. And I see all sorts of people who for all sorts of reason go, if you like, off track in their teens / twenties (or maybe just a different track). The great thing about professional registration is that, when it works as intended, it considers your actual proven competence in your profession, not what you did or didn't do 10, 20, 30 years earlier.

(Incidentally, and possibly relevant to the discussion for the same reason, the reason I was rated so low at 11 was because I had terrible eczema on my hands compounded by, I've only recently realised, the fact I probably had and still have a level of dyspraxia. You didn't get scores at school if you couldn't write, you didn't get marks for being able to think. Industry, however, is a different game. And of course that's only one example, in recruitment and staff development I came across, and still occasionally do come across, many other causes of missed identification of engineering abilities. I'm a huge fan of education, but I don't always (i.e. very rarely) place great reliance on formal assessment of educational attainment.)

Sorry, further thought over lunch: another great thing about professional registration is that it considers and demonstrates how you work as part of an engineering team. (I was just thinking about the trivial example that I still try to avoid taking minutes at meetings if it requires handwriting, but that's fine, we have a team.) As an employer I would generally rather have somebody competent who works well in a team, compared to somebody brilliant who's impossible to work with and who has no interest in compensating for that fact (that second point is important). Employing a professionally registered engineer should give you confidence in those team working and communication skills and attributes. Again formal education doesn't often give you marks for saying "I don't know the answer to that, but I know someone who does" - but very often that's what we need. Of course occasionally we do need the brilliant person who is maybe less well rounded as an engineer, and that's fine, we can identify that from their qualifications and track record. 

Hello Andy:

I am not a team player!

One can not be a team player if one is a "keeper of secrets".

I have been in meeting locations where an armed individual follows you, when you visit the bathroom.

Going back to my grammar school experience (actually back to my third primary school, the second having been firebombed in WWII) at  that time it was an "all boys" school, which I believe solves a lot of "acting up" problems.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

There are different sorts of engineering companies, depending on the type of work being done, and I can sympathize with both perspectives here, which are not really in opposition, but seem to think they are.

The school you go to may give you a push in a the right or wrong direction, but is only relevant for the first steps you take beyond it, and in engineering at least, stroking the old college tie in meetings but not actually  being competent is not a guarantee of promotion, nor I suspect was it ever in anything requiring some ability. (it may work in marketing, I'm not sure)

Research is more tolerant than development of oddball characters, especially once you have something that needs one of the three folk in the world who understand 'it' - whatever 'it' is, then someone who walks down the corridor making dalek noises and frightening the undergraduates during their day job may indeed still be an essential member of the team, even if you have to keep them away from direct contact with the customer and translate everything they say or write into plainspeak for the rest of the team.

Development however needs solid understanding, reliable repetition of similarly well-understood  tasks and methodically created easy to follow records of the design and there is a lot more of it needed than there is pure research.

I have worked with feet in both camps over the years and both 'sides' seem to view the other with suspicion, as not being 'proper' engineering, when really the division is more of a continuum.

Mike