I was reading an article in today's IET on-line magazine about the shortage of technicians to work on solar panels, heat pump etc and it struck me that all these jobs involve working on equipment that operates at relatively high DC or AC voltages.
Is this shortage of people willing to join these professions, due to fear of being zapped?
Most kids and teens are only used to operating with low voltage equipment (cellphones, PC's, circuit boards).
Peter
Like any school it does need the right sort of staff, and enough of them, and that starts at the head and goes all the way through.
Isn't that the truth, doesn't matter whether you pay or not.
Sadly, and I know there are a lot of people working extremely hard to address this, but in some of the areas where the state grammar school system was decimated, what replaced it was not done so well.
I would not so politely suggest it is incorrect to look down on us 'comps' collectively as being in some way inferior to those who have passed through what I could just as well call an anachronistic and elitist system.
No-one doing that, I only made an observation to a comment made. There's also a difference between state ('county') grammar and 'public (private) school'.
At the end of the day, some people prefer one type of environment, others prefer others ... parents think they know what they want for their children, but they are not the children, and therefore the strange situation that no-one actually knows 100 % what will work for a child until it's all too late.
As a young person, I would have been put off by a large [population] school of whatever type, and, being honest, would likely have absconded regularly. I still don't like huge crowds ... shopping malls are just my idea of hell on earth 
...
In case you cannot detect this sort of bias based on education gets my goat, I probably saw too much of it at University.
I guess that's just 'politics' in reality. We all have different experiences that form our opinions and positions on things.
I don't (hopefully) have bias based on where someone attained their education, but I'm happy that my high school experience worked for me, and I wouldn't also like anyone to be biased against me for that. (For the record, private school from 11 to 18, but fees paid by a scholarship scheme.)
I think we perhaps share the perspective that qualifications alone are not an answer for those in Engineering ... practical experience is king.
I will try to keep my further comments minimal and on topic.
Yes, I think it's wise not to poke the cage of the political animal, especially at the current time in the lead up to the Election. I'm seeing some disgusting things on social media platforms and am using those only sparingly at present !
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...
