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You don't need practical skills to be an engineer

Hi,

Ok, that's a deliberately provocative thread title, but it's one I'm willing to defend. But let's go back a bit first...

There have been various discussions on these forums over very many years where someone says in passing statements such us "CEng now needs a Masters degree, but Master students come out with no practical skills". Of course I'm paraphrasing greatly, but I'm sure people will get the idea. Similarly I've heard the view expressed at many engineering gatherings of "our graduates come in not knowing how to solder / use a spanner / wire a plug". Now I'm sure often these statements are perfectly true for many of those entering the engineering profession, the question is whether it matters. And I'd argue that much of the time it does not, and that it's important that we debate this. (Hence this thread!)

To give my own perspective on this, my background is as an analogue audio frequency design engineer, with my postgraduate entry level jobs to this role being as a maintenance and then test engineer. Back in the 1980s I did need to dismantle, solder, and mantle again. My first development roles were based around soldering irons and test equipment. By the early '90s my analogue development team was based around modelling tools, our prototypes were surface mount, and although we used manual test equipment the amount of building / modifying we did was tiny - and ideas and the ability to play around with them were FAR more important than practical skills. Then our world went digital. Analogue modelling had improved the performance of our systems 10 fold, digital systems improved the possibilities 100 fold. The digital teams needed no practical skills whatsoever, but my goodness they did - and do - some fabulous engineering.

Of course, there is still a real world to interface this technology to. And this is where the key word in the subject of this post comes in - that word "need". We do need a proportion of engineers to have practical skills to cope with the real world interface, but we don't need every engineer to have those skills to contribute to a team. For me this is summed up beautifully by my one and only patent (sadly not renewed, eu EP2100792 (A1) if anyone's interested!). There are five of us named on it, these are:

A mathematical modeller

A DSP on FPGA implementer

An analogue electronic systems modeller / application specialist

A hardware developer

A manager / systems integrator / systems concept engineer / patent author and general herder of cats (me)

Only one of these needed practical skills. And yet this was an extraordinary engineering innovation. I'm allowed to say that as I didn't do the really clever bits, my main role was to bring the skills together and enable them - and that's the point. None of these people could have come up with the overall solution by themselves, that's why all are named on the patent.

So I would - and do - argue very strongly that an excellent engineering innovation team needs three skill sets within it:

Practical skills

Theoretical skills

Human skills

And the best teams have the best people in each of those areas, working together and respecting each other. So a mathematical modeller knows their system is "garbage in, garbage out", and works with those with application knowledge to help them refine their models. And a prototyping engineer knows their prototype is useless with no software to run on it. And they all know they will make mistakes, and will have misunderstandings, and so managing the human side of the development is vital. Working in this atmosphere of mutual respect is tremendous. Been there, done that. Working in an atmosphere of silos, sneering, one-upmanship, and inverted or verted snobbery is destructive and, I submit to the court your honour, produces poor engineering (by any measure). Been there, done that, left the company (a long time ago).

Now there is an argument, I've used it myself, that practical experience helps develop problem solving skills. And for some engineering activities I would support this. However a lot of modern engineering is based around very deep mathematical modelling, that's how we've achieved the fantastic advances in, for example, communications and data management we have over the past 20 years. So we have to accept that those involved will become abstracted from the "real world", it's then a management problem to manage the interfaces. In my present field, safety engineering, it is a reality that software engineers will implement what they are asked to implement. There's a whole other level first to define those implementation requirements correctly and thoroughly, which requires a different skill set. (And validating is a different skill again.)

So can I propose that we stop saying "engineers coming out of university with no practical skills is a Bad Thing" and similar statements - but I am very willing to support the statement "not enough engineers coming into the profession with practical skills is a Bad Thing".

Thoughts?

By the way, bizarrely my practical engineering skills are now way better than they were in my 20s when I actually needed them for work, partly due to experience, mainly unfortunately due to medical issues at the time. In fact (as one or two of my more "old school" supervisors delighted in pointing out) I was pretty cack-handed. (I just checked, cack-handed is not rude!) I'd like to pass on my appreciation to those enlightened managers who realised that my problem solving skills meant that I was valuable - they just needed to make sure that nothing I touched ever made its way to a customer! There is a VERY serious point here, I could easily have been put off engineering for life with that attitude of "you're cack-handed, therefore you're an incompetent engineer". Although I do apologise in retrospect to the The Kinks for any reliability issues in the mixing desk they bought in 1985 which I worked on rather a lot, probably the product that has gone into service which has more of my personal soldering in than any other...I did get one of my more dexterous colleagues to check it over very thoroughly before it went out!

Thanks,

Andy

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0 Andy Millar over 7 years ago

Many thanks for excellent comments!

Mark: re your point "You don't necessarily need practical skills to be an engineer" of course I completely agree - I was being deliberately provocative with the title! I'd just got slightly frustrated with a few water cooler instances recently of engineers being rude and condescending about other, perfectly competent, engineers for having "no practical skills". And hopefully it's clear I also completely agree with Alasdair's (and other people's) points that we need the whole range of skills, and they don't all need to be in the same person. If we start hearing engineers belittling others for having "no maths skills" or "no creativity" we must equally bring it up. It's just unfortunate that "no practical skills" seems to have become a bit of a meme.

Roy: Fantastic food for thought. To follow up a few points:

My early education emphasised knowledge of facts rather than analysis or the presentation of ideas/concepts

You could spin a whole piece of PhD research into engineering education and development on that! (And people have.) I suspect that actually all professions are like this, some sections believe that excellence is about assimilating facts and knowledge (and skills), other sections believe it's about ideas and concepts. In fact both are needed. But I find this particularly interesting with regard to engineering as I've always regarded it as a creative subject and hence something that can't (just) be taught. I don't just want to know what the previous engineer did and repeat it, I want to improve on it. Now to be fair this meant I was probably a bit blind in my early career to the excellent lessons that can be learnt from past practice, but fair enough we all (hopefully) gain perspective as we get older. But once again I think this is horses for courses, we need a real mixture in the profession of solid knowledge of current best practice together with a willingness to break the mould and try something new. And again these don't all have to be in one person, although this is probably the area where it is most challenging to get people with these different perspectives to respect each others views - but it can be done.

When I was making career choices, I didn’t know anyone in my social circle who had attended university and I aspired to independent adulthood, earning my own keep etc. asap

I'd go one step further from this point. Every so often I like asking people how they got into engineering, and over 90% of the time it seems to be partly from at least one parent being an engineer / technician. I may get a bit controversial here, and I'm happy to admit to having no hard evidence so can easily be shot down, but I have a very strong impression that a large percentage of us who are (or have recently been) leaders in UK engineering will have been influenced - perhaps more strongly than we like to admit - by our parent's (or at least our parents generation's) attitude to engineering. Which in the UK from the 1930s to 1960s was very heavily, and necessarily, based on practical problem solving. As I mentioned, in my career I've seen modelling absolutely revolutionise engineering design work - which is brilliant, but is a culture shock to the profession. And I think we should feel happy to admit that - as AA would say the first step is to admit you have a problem. ("Hi, my name's Andy, and I'm a traditional engineer. In the last week I used 15 op-amps a day.")

Operations and maintenance of high value intensively used assets requires a “bias for action”, much of the time that we might call “practical”.

Perhaps research development and fundamental design begin with a “bias for analysis” first which we might call “intellectual”.

Within the “Engineering Council family” an analytical or conceptual approach is considered to be “of an intellectually higher order” or “academic”. It is therefore held in higher esteem, than a “more practical” or “vocational” approach.

And vice versa for those working in operational areas who can - and often do - hold a practical approach in higher esteem. So this leads to a interesting thought (which I think emerges from a few of the above posts): is it really a lack of "practical" skills that is causing other engineers (and employers) a problem, or is it sometimes really a lack of that "bias for action"? As I mentioned above, I started my career in roles where you had to problem solve immediately to keep the system going, and then sort out the underlying problems afterwards, and this was fantastically useful when I moved into R&D as I could speak to customers, applications engineers and manufacturing staff in their own language - I could feel their pain at having down time in their systems. And I think this chimes with the point about:

What many employers are really complaining about is the graduate lacking sufficient usable skills to make a productive contribution quickly.

If new entrants - graduates or not - have a "bias for action" and a suitably thorough approach they are likely to find solutions to problems, including identifying people who have the practical and theoretical skills to support solving the problem. (By the way, this is why I like UKSpec, because it does - to me - identify this approach.) So yes, I think it is a challenge for the industry to find ways of developing those skills, and there is a particular problem that academic education, for perfectly good practical purposes, actively eliminates team problem solving skills which are exactly what we need! If a student at his viva said "I got this student to write the software for me, this other one to build it, this other one to test it, this fourth one to do the presentation, and I kicked it off and kept it on track to meet the requirements to time and budget" they would fail. But my goodness would they be employable!

My kicking off this thread didn't actually come from comments from engineering employers (although I have heard some express this view, so it could have done), but rather from other engineers. Particularly, I was at a gathering recently where I heard (from different people) both "the problem with graduates today is they have no practical skills" and "the problem with women engineers is that you train them up and then they just go and get pregnant" *. I think, whilst understanding why and how people have developed these opinions, it's important to bring these attitudes out from the water cooler and into the glare of daylight!

Thanks again all, hopefully a useful thread to point to when this issue gets mentioned in passing in other future threads?

Cheers,

Andy

* A whole other thread in this one of course...
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0 Andy Millar over 7 years ago

Many thanks for excellent comments!

Mark: re your point "You don't necessarily need practical skills to be an engineer" of course I completely agree - I was being deliberately provocative with the title! I'd just got slightly frustrated with a few water cooler instances recently of engineers being rude and condescending about other, perfectly competent, engineers for having "no practical skills". And hopefully it's clear I also completely agree with Alasdair's (and other people's) points that we need the whole range of skills, and they don't all need to be in the same person. If we start hearing engineers belittling others for having "no maths skills" or "no creativity" we must equally bring it up. It's just unfortunate that "no practical skills" seems to have become a bit of a meme.

Roy: Fantastic food for thought. To follow up a few points:

My early education emphasised knowledge of facts rather than analysis or the presentation of ideas/concepts

You could spin a whole piece of PhD research into engineering education and development on that! (And people have.) I suspect that actually all professions are like this, some sections believe that excellence is about assimilating facts and knowledge (and skills), other sections believe it's about ideas and concepts. In fact both are needed. But I find this particularly interesting with regard to engineering as I've always regarded it as a creative subject and hence something that can't (just) be taught. I don't just want to know what the previous engineer did and repeat it, I want to improve on it. Now to be fair this meant I was probably a bit blind in my early career to the excellent lessons that can be learnt from past practice, but fair enough we all (hopefully) gain perspective as we get older. But once again I think this is horses for courses, we need a real mixture in the profession of solid knowledge of current best practice together with a willingness to break the mould and try something new. And again these don't all have to be in one person, although this is probably the area where it is most challenging to get people with these different perspectives to respect each others views - but it can be done.

When I was making career choices, I didn’t know anyone in my social circle who had attended university and I aspired to independent adulthood, earning my own keep etc. asap

I'd go one step further from this point. Every so often I like asking people how they got into engineering, and over 90% of the time it seems to be partly from at least one parent being an engineer / technician. I may get a bit controversial here, and I'm happy to admit to having no hard evidence so can easily be shot down, but I have a very strong impression that a large percentage of us who are (or have recently been) leaders in UK engineering will have been influenced - perhaps more strongly than we like to admit - by our parent's (or at least our parents generation's) attitude to engineering. Which in the UK from the 1930s to 1960s was very heavily, and necessarily, based on practical problem solving. As I mentioned, in my career I've seen modelling absolutely revolutionise engineering design work - which is brilliant, but is a culture shock to the profession. And I think we should feel happy to admit that - as AA would say the first step is to admit you have a problem. ("Hi, my name's Andy, and I'm a traditional engineer. In the last week I used 15 op-amps a day.")

Operations and maintenance of high value intensively used assets requires a “bias for action”, much of the time that we might call “practical”.

Perhaps research development and fundamental design begin with a “bias for analysis” first which we might call “intellectual”.

Within the “Engineering Council family” an analytical or conceptual approach is considered to be “of an intellectually higher order” or “academic”. It is therefore held in higher esteem, than a “more practical” or “vocational” approach.

And vice versa for those working in operational areas who can - and often do - hold a practical approach in higher esteem. So this leads to a interesting thought (which I think emerges from a few of the above posts): is it really a lack of "practical" skills that is causing other engineers (and employers) a problem, or is it sometimes really a lack of that "bias for action"? As I mentioned above, I started my career in roles where you had to problem solve immediately to keep the system going, and then sort out the underlying problems afterwards, and this was fantastically useful when I moved into R&D as I could speak to customers, applications engineers and manufacturing staff in their own language - I could feel their pain at having down time in their systems. And I think this chimes with the point about:

What many employers are really complaining about is the graduate lacking sufficient usable skills to make a productive contribution quickly.

If new entrants - graduates or not - have a "bias for action" and a suitably thorough approach they are likely to find solutions to problems, including identifying people who have the practical and theoretical skills to support solving the problem. (By the way, this is why I like UKSpec, because it does - to me - identify this approach.) So yes, I think it is a challenge for the industry to find ways of developing those skills, and there is a particular problem that academic education, for perfectly good practical purposes, actively eliminates team problem solving skills which are exactly what we need! If a student at his viva said "I got this student to write the software for me, this other one to build it, this other one to test it, this fourth one to do the presentation, and I kicked it off and kept it on track to meet the requirements to time and budget" they would fail. But my goodness would they be employable!

My kicking off this thread didn't actually come from comments from engineering employers (although I have heard some express this view, so it could have done), but rather from other engineers. Particularly, I was at a gathering recently where I heard (from different people) both "the problem with graduates today is they have no practical skills" and "the problem with women engineers is that you train them up and then they just go and get pregnant" *. I think, whilst understanding why and how people have developed these opinions, it's important to bring these attitudes out from the water cooler and into the glare of daylight!

Thanks again all, hopefully a useful thread to point to when this issue gets mentioned in passing in other future threads?

Cheers,

Andy

* A whole other thread in this one of course...
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