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 Mark:

This afternoon in JAMA , a medical research article titled "Sex differences in the global prevalence of non suicidal self-injury in adolescents" by Fiona Moloney highlights that in most of the world females are more likely to experience mental related problems, however in Asia the opposite is true, that is more males are impacted.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

I think there may actually be a long term problem with mental health and the use of electronics as a source of 'chat' rather than having real friends of the kind you can actually hit if they offend you.
It may be that about now we are me or less as it was with smoking and various lung diseases when I was a child,  we are at the stage where we cannot say 'cause' or 'co-incidence' .

And for those who wonder coincidence happens

The Storks and Baby paper

 M

Hello:-

When I took my first Statistics course we were all warned "It may have a probability of "one in a ten million" but don't be surprised when it happens to you"!

I happen to really believe in "Black Swan" events (long tail events for normal distribution).  It happens because we have an incomplete  or a biased knowledge base.

Having worked in leading edge tech areas I discovered (for example) that metals in very thin films act completely different to those in "bulk" situations. 

Your "Storks" example could just as well have been "Easter eggs" laid by Rabbits. 

My reference to "Asians" is a more generic term to that quoted in the research paper, which could have upset the IET leadership. 

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 

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

Peter Brooks said:

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.

Incidentally on this point, I was asked to act as a professional registration adviser for staff at a well known UK government facility that employs a lot of software engineers (and yes is very thoroughly and rigorously defended). We had no problem at all demonstrating their team working skills - and I know of several other PRAs who've done the same thing and would say the same thing. Despite the fact that I have no idea what their real names were or, of course, any idea what they were working on. What I was interested in was: do you get your engineering checked by someone else and do you take in their feedback and react appropriately to it? When you produce an output, do you explain it to the staff who need to implement it, and again take feedback? And at the start of the project, do you engage with the person / team supplying you with the requirements to ensure that you understand it? If you do then you're an adequate team player. Which of course they all were, you wouldn't be allowed to stay working in that world if you weren't. 

And it got even more interesting than that, as in general they couldn't even discuss their work with people in the same "branch of the civil service" except for very specific people. But that was ok too - all they needed to show was that they engaged professionally with the people they were able to engage with - which I got the impression might be very few people for some of them on some projects, but still a "team".

Lovely bunch, of course sadly due to the confidentiality I have no idea if they ever got their CEngs / IEngs, I'm sure that provided they did apply then they would have done. I had a really interesting conversation with a very senior person there where we agreed how to write a professional registration application without giving any hint about what the "civil servant" was working on, let alone what department they were a part of.