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:

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

Hello Andy:

Have you ever been involved in "team building" using Psychiatry - over here it was called "Tea grouping or encounter grouping"?

 It's like (seems to me) water boarding a person, without using water.

The group (all in one room over 3 day period) attempts to break down barriers.

It starts by asking what animal best describes yourself.

It appears to mostly attempt to break down the weakest member of the team.

In some cases that person ends up in tears after a triggered memory event.

Over the years, I went through three of them without any problems.

Peter Brooks 

Palm Bay 

Sounds awful. I've done a huge amount of work on team building (comes with the territory of running engineering teams, plus it's a major interest of mine anyway) but my approach was/is much simpler, just making sure that everyone appreciated each others' strengths in the engineering team. To deliver engineering projects you need the people who manage the paperwork, and manage the budget, and build the prototypes and first production versions, and design the production test systems, and talk to the end user, just as much as you need the people with the brilliant ideas. As I once told two members of my staff who were almost coming to blows, you don't have to like each other, you don't have to go to the pub together, but if you can't respect each other's skills and communicate effectively at a technical level then that's a problem.

Sometimes when working with EngTech/IEng/CEng applicants I do work with those - particularly with certain aspects of autistic spectrum behaviour - who do struggle to work in what might be thought of as a "team" environment. I point out to them that they don't even have to talk to other members of the team, but they must communicate with them effectively - for example by producing engineering documentation and taking in review comments on that documentation. I used to have a brilliant software engineer working for me who had issues talking to pretty much anyone in the department, and then moved to Australia anyway. It was fine, we'd send him a coding spec in the evening and next morning we'd get completed documented code. Perfectly good team playing.

For some reason I was reminded recently of the quote from Tim from the (UK) "The Office", something like: "These aren't my friends, they're just people I share the same carpet with  Monday to Friday". That's fine, which I think a lot of "corporate team building" forgets. However, equally I was discussion with a colleague this morning that post-covid we have fewer and fewer in person meetings with clients or with each other, and we were agreeing that that is causing issues. I do find it's much easier for people to gain and maintain that mutual respect for each other's abilities if there has been some element of socialising - the intra-meeting coffee break. Or to put it another way, it's much easier to dismiss someone as an idiot (which they're probably not) if you're just viewing them as their role, not as a human being. So I am a believer in some level of team building - or "conversation" to use the technical term!!!!!

I think we've strayed again, but maybe not - as above I think it's a strong aspect of professional registration to question whether "working as an island" is going to produce the best engineering. We all make mistakes, we all miss things, and we all have different competences.

I could probably write a book length post on this subject (in fact to some extent my Master's thesis was just that, and that was only a specific part of what I've looked at over the years) so I think I'd probably better stop there.

P.S. I moved into consultancy after 15 years' full time engineering management because I was just exhausted with trying to get (very, very competent) engineers to work together nicely. We were really effective at it, but my gawd it took its toll on us managing them. I did enjoy the last office reorganisation we did (by this time 95% ish of that team had been working with me for something like 12-13 of those years and knew me very well) - I just announced we were going to move office while I was on leave, so they'd all have to work out for themselves who was going to sit next to who  and who was going to sit next to the window / under the air conditioning etc etc - this time I was not going to arbitrate! The shock and horror on their faces was hilarious, of course it all worked out fine.

Hello Andy:

How can you really be a member of a team if you don't respect many of them for their actions outside work ?

Examples from my actual work experience - drug use, wife abuse, having "out of marriage" affairs and coming to work half drunk?

I also have had some upper management commit Suicide due to work stress.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

P.S. I can't mention everything I have observed over my working life, as some of the individuals are still alive. 

Hello Andy:

How can you really be a member of a team if you don't respect many of them for their actions outside work ?

Examples from my actual work experience - drug use, wife abuse, having "out of marriage" affairs and coming to work half drunk?

I also have had some upper management commit Suicide due to work stress.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

P.S. I can't mention everything I have observed over my working life, as some of the individuals are still alive. 

Peter Brooks said:

How can you really be a member of a team if you don't respect many of them for their actions outside work ?

Fair question, and yet again in this thread would make a very interesting professional registration question (and that wasn't even me trying to drag it onto topic).

Let's turn that around. Back to my point that it is not possible today to do serious innovative engineering by yourself. Richard Trevithick could design and build a steam engine in his shed more-or-less by himself, but today's technology is too complicated for that. (On another thread there was a discussion about high-end sound equipment, an industry I used to work in which has always had a high number of "one person" design teams. Who could produce some truly awful designs without someone else to say "ok that bit's brilliant, but this bit...not so much".) So we have to work in teams, sometimes of a handful of people, sometimes in the hundreds.

What are the chances that we will have the same values, ethics, whatever as all members of that team? Basically zero, unless we are so uniform that we've lost the benefit of diversity. There's an old story (possibly with a germ of truth in it) about Microsoft, that Bill Gates surrounded himself with people like himself, who in turn did the same...which was why there was a company that produced loads of new designs that went out to market untested, because none of them were interested in testing. Other companies have folded before even getting started because they tested their new designs to death so never actually shipped anything. Simple example, but just one of the need for very different approaches and attitudes.

Graham and Mark have just neatly made an example in the last few posts, there's a very good reason we work to avoid discussing politics on these forums, which can be very challenging given the "political" context of a lot of engineering. The way we all work together is by talking about engineering. We may decide that we will be friends with colleagues in our private life because our values do coincide, but if they don't then the question is just - are they competent in the engineering I am working with them on.

I used to be deputy director of a 120 person business. We had all sorts working there. Perhaps the most interesting perspective was being involved in disciplinary work. If someone's home life brought the company into disrepute (or similar) we could sack them for it. If it didn't then it was legally none of our business (and we had some tricky cases to decide on that). If you can't sack them then you have to work together assuming they are competent to do what you are actually paying them to do. Fortunately that's the extreme end which doesn't happen that often. The more common was highlit in 2015-2016 with Brexit (and I'd guess the same thing in the US with the first Trump nomination). We had to be very clear that the antipathy that rose up between colleagues outside the workplace could not be allowed to enter the workplace. 

I loathe the idea of homogenous corporate teams, partly instinctively and partly because as above I think it increases the risk of producing bad engineering. (One of the few things I disagreed with my old director about was that he wanted everyone to wear corporate branded clothing. I simply didn't wear it.) For me team work is simply communicating professionally - working together to produce the best result using each of our skills. And if someone has a skill that I don't have, I don't have to like them in order to do that. 

Deciding that we're only going to respect perfect people (i.e. people exactly like ourselves ) is a slippery slope, as many have found throughout human existence...whereas, as the old advice goes, treat everyone with respect as human beings and they'll treat you the same way back, even if you disagree.

Like I say, it would make a really interesting professional registration interview question...

Hello Andy:

Confusing access to a companies computers and application software as being a team member is incorrect. 

I used to spend more time with the companies lawyer (for example) prior to making a public presentation than the person I reported to on the organization chart. The company was very concerned about giving away sensitive information..

Bill Gates got started because of IBM and he typified the Silicon Valley counterculture of that period. I used to work in Silicon Valley by the way.

At one time I attempted to join the IET committee involved in Disciplinary work but couldn't reach an agreement with the IET lawyer over the IET ethics rules in place, at that time.

To end with another one of my real life stories:- The Top manager of the company I worked for, issued an edict that staff were not allowed to drink booze at lunch. Someone called an "out of office" meeting just after lunch at a local boat club. Guess who was propping up the bar, half cut?

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

Peter Brooks said:

Confusing access to a companies computers and application software as being a team member is incorrect

Yes that would be true if somebody did that.

Peter, I suggest we limit discussions on this thread to matters relating to the original topic so that it is relevant to the potential readership. Just for once even I can't find any points in your latest post to respond to in a way that relates to professional registration, other than repeating the points I have already made above.

You know that point in a meeting where the chair discreetly says "I think it's time to move on from that discussion...", I think we may have reached the point (or indeed be somewhat beyond it) where if Lisa was here she might be saying that...

But of course you may want to start a new discussion thread (or more than one) as you clearly have significant concerns which you may wish to discuss more generally with the forum members without being limited by the subject matter of an existing thread.

I don't plan to post further on this thread other than to discuss professional registration, and only then if I'm not just repeating my earlier posts.

Hello Andy:

This thread is effectively dead anyway.

It will appear again like a Phoenix raising from the ashes, when the IET pushes the topic again in a few years.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay