Engineers who did not enjoy school - are they rare?

While I've got a couple of minutes on the train, I want to very strongly support this point. My experience has been that (in a business context) those who have been to private and public schools have, on average, much better social and communication skills than those who have been to state schools.. Which to me goes to show that it can be done - so PLEASE let's get state schools up towards that same level!


I still vividly remember judging an Engineering Education Scheme day, with three teams of sixth formers: one from a comprehensive, one from a grammar school, and one from a private school. Technically their projects were totally comparable in quality and scope. But when they came to give presentations - it was pure stereotype. The private school group knew exactly what they were going to say and how they were going to say it, and they knew the background so they weren't thrown by questions. Most of all they had confidence. The grammar school group gave an adequate but slightly boring presentation. The comprehensive school group were - frankly - all over the place and very badly prepared: very, very frustrating and unnecessary.


That said, my own children went to the local comp, but do actually have excellent presentation skills (much better than mine!). I think this is partly down to the extraordinary (state) primary school they attended, and also because they did a lot of drama and music.


Another thought, I think the most important thing for engineers is to realise that adequate social and communication skills can be learnt to a level sufficient to operate successfully in a modern engineering team and project environment. These are not set in stone at 18 (or whatever age) for the rest of your life. Of course this does involve the engineer in question recognising that they have a problem in the first place - most of us will have come across the type of engineer who believes that they are brilliant at communication and teamwork (and, indeed, everything else) and cannot understand why no-one else wants to work with them - and often why they keep getting made redundant. (Personally I started from a pretty low level, and am very much still learning.)


And finally, I had a thought overnight on the litmus test for all this - which I certainly failed the first time around. My first project management role was to go off to a site installation project and get it finished. I found the two wiremen there had found they were on a nice little crib, all expenses paid in a nice part of the country, a friendly local barmaid who'd give them blank receipts, they were very happy to spin this out for as long as possible. (Their work was technically excellent, I suspect that 30 years later some of it is still in place, but way too slow.) As I rapidly found, despite extensive use of simile, metaphor, probably even litote, A level standard English was no help whatsoever in motivating them to finish the job in something approaching time! That's the difference between language and communication. (And, in hindsight, also an excellent example of bad management - I should never have been sent there without further development.)


Well that's odd, I seem to be going through Swindon, I have absolutely no idea why. Blessed rail engineers


Cheers,


Andy

While I've got a couple of minutes on the train, I want to very strongly support this point. My experience has been that (in a business context) those who have been to private and public schools have, on average, much better social and communication skills than those who have been to state schools.. Which to me goes to show that it can be done - so PLEASE let's get state schools up towards that same level!


I still vividly remember judging an Engineering Education Scheme day, with three teams of sixth formers: one from a comprehensive, one from a grammar school, and one from a private school. Technically their projects were totally comparable in quality and scope. But when they came to give presentations - it was pure stereotype. The private school group knew exactly what they were going to say and how they were going to say it, and they knew the background so they weren't thrown by questions. Most of all they had confidence. The grammar school group gave an adequate but slightly boring presentation. The comprehensive school group were - frankly - all over the place and very badly prepared: very, very frustrating and unnecessary.


That said, my own children went to the local comp, but do actually have excellent presentation skills (much better than mine!). I think this is partly down to the extraordinary (state) primary school they attended, and also because they did a lot of drama and music.


Another thought, I think the most important thing for engineers is to realise that adequate social and communication skills can be learnt to a level sufficient to operate successfully in a modern engineering team and project environment. These are not set in stone at 18 (or whatever age) for the rest of your life. Of course this does involve the engineer in question recognising that they have a problem in the first place - most of us will have come across the type of engineer who believes that they are brilliant at communication and teamwork (and, indeed, everything else) and cannot understand why no-one else wants to work with them - and often why they keep getting made redundant. (Personally I started from a pretty low level, and am very much still learning.)


And finally, I had a thought overnight on the litmus test for all this - which I certainly failed the first time around. My first project management role was to go off to a site installation project and get it finished. I found the two wiremen there had found they were on a nice little crib, all expenses paid in a nice part of the country, a friendly local barmaid who'd give them blank receipts, they were very happy to spin this out for as long as possible. (Their work was technically excellent, I suspect that 30 years later some of it is still in place, but way too slow.) As I rapidly found, despite extensive use of simile, metaphor, probably even litote, A level standard English was no help whatsoever in motivating them to finish the job in something approaching time! That's the difference between language and communication. (And, in hindsight, also an excellent example of bad management - I should never have been sent there without further development.)


Well that's odd, I seem to be going through Swindon, I have absolutely no idea why. Blessed rail engineers


Cheers,


Andy