Just a small caveat on the above, I do have concerns about universities focusing too much on producing "employment ready" graduates. This could - if taken to extreme - result in graduates that are fantastic for their first 1-2 years in work, and in particular in delivering what the companies are already doing, but don't have the new knowledge to excel 3-5 years into their career, or to take their employer in new directions.
As I mentioned in (I think) the previous closed thread, one of the issues that arose from this that seriously concerned me was when a government spokesperson spoke of "a university that would train the next generation of engineers". Universities should give an environment for encouraging enquiring minds to enquire further, training is a separate and equally important area of education.
Our profession (in the UK) is very strange, and - I think - self-harming, in that we do not recognise the need for post graduate experience to hone the application of the university experience. Medicine, accountancy, law, teaching - even architecture* - all understand this.
(* I've never understood why only civil engineers have their own profession for their design teams.)
That said, I do totally encourage work experience while at university, particularly a year in industry, it means the graduate is more likely to be socially ready for work. And I do wish universities would find a way of increasing the level of understanding of business practice and business law in their graduates - this is the sort of thing which employers won't teach*. But - to take it to an extreme - if they are coming out trained in (say) soldering or welding then I think that is a waste of the university experience, there are much better environments - including in employment - to learn those skills.
(* Sadly decades of experience shows that undergrad engineers will go to extreme lengths to avoid those subjects. Mea Culpa. Then a few years later they complain when business graduates get the manager jobs )
In brief, I see a responsibility on both sides of the fence here. Including for employers to stop being snobbish, and accept that if for a particular role they need FE (rather than HE) trained engineers then that's who they should recruit.
Final thought has just occurred to me: I guess it's still true - it certainly was a few years ago - that engineering graduates with 1st class degrees were being vacuumed up by the finance industry. If they weren't "employer ready" for engineering, they certainly weren't for finance which they would have received no education in at all. However that industry took the approach "these are bright highly numerate young people, we can train them in our industry specific skills". I am no great fan of the finance industry en masse, but it is huge shame if they show far more faith in and understanding of our discipline's graduates than we do.
Just a small caveat on the above, I do have concerns about universities focusing too much on producing "employment ready" graduates. This could - if taken to extreme - result in graduates that are fantastic for their first 1-2 years in work, and in particular in delivering what the companies are already doing, but don't have the new knowledge to excel 3-5 years into their career, or to take their employer in new directions.
As I mentioned in (I think) the previous closed thread, one of the issues that arose from this that seriously concerned me was when a government spokesperson spoke of "a university that would train the next generation of engineers". Universities should give an environment for encouraging enquiring minds to enquire further, training is a separate and equally important area of education.
Our profession (in the UK) is very strange, and - I think - self-harming, in that we do not recognise the need for post graduate experience to hone the application of the university experience. Medicine, accountancy, law, teaching - even architecture* - all understand this.
(* I've never understood why only civil engineers have their own profession for their design teams.)
That said, I do totally encourage work experience while at university, particularly a year in industry, it means the graduate is more likely to be socially ready for work. And I do wish universities would find a way of increasing the level of understanding of business practice and business law in their graduates - this is the sort of thing which employers won't teach*. But - to take it to an extreme - if they are coming out trained in (say) soldering or welding then I think that is a waste of the university experience, there are much better environments - including in employment - to learn those skills.
(* Sadly decades of experience shows that undergrad engineers will go to extreme lengths to avoid those subjects. Mea Culpa. Then a few years later they complain when business graduates get the manager jobs )
In brief, I see a responsibility on both sides of the fence here. Including for employers to stop being snobbish, and accept that if for a particular role they need FE (rather than HE) trained engineers then that's who they should recruit.
Final thought has just occurred to me: I guess it's still true - it certainly was a few years ago - that engineering graduates with 1st class degrees were being vacuumed up by the finance industry. If they weren't "employer ready" for engineering, they certainly weren't for finance which they would have received no education in at all. However that industry took the approach "these are bright highly numerate young people, we can train them in our industry specific skills". I am no great fan of the finance industry en masse, but it is huge shame if they show far more faith in and understanding of our discipline's graduates than we do.
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