Bridging the Skills Gap in Engineerin

In my personal opinion:

Al Muatasem Al Saadi said:

Do we need more industry–education partnerships (live projects, mentoring, placements)?

Yes

Al Muatasem Al Saadi said:

Could accredited online learning or micro-credentials be an acceptable alternative?

No. (Based on my experience recruiting over very many years...my experience is that employers know that gaining skills works much better in employment. It's good for showing an interest, but a good employer will know that it's unlikely that any real useful knowledge will have been gained. That said, it can impress HR departments who are just looking for key words on CVs.)

Al Muatasem Al Saadi said:

Or is the real issue that young engineers already have the skills but don’t know how to present them to employers?

Sometimes. Or equally see next answer.

Al Muatasem Al Saadi said:

Should employers expect a “finished product” or invest more in shaping raw talent?

Or generally be looking in a more open minded way at new recruits to try to draw out potential skills. However, remember that most employers recruit people because they do not currently have enough staff to deliver their product or service to customers. They are not a public service, and very few have the spare cash to wait 2-5 years (for example) to get useful work from a new recruit. This is a massive problem for the engineering industry world wide, and there is no simple solution - if there was then at some point over the last 45 years we'd have seen it introduced. (I chose 45 years because that is roughly the time over which free market economics has become the norm world wide, and the challenge is to find a solution that is compatible with that free market approach.)

However, asking the question is always a good first step to finding a solution! 

This would be a really useful subject for the IET to host a conference on - as a first step you could try pushing for that.

Thanks,

Andy

... and further and higher education are looking back too much, and trying to teach what's perceived as the skills gap, yet to deal with "new technologies" and "new applications" that appear all of the time, what is really needed is a basic set of "problem solving tools" and, for the more hands-on craftspersons in the industry, a set of equivalent "practical tools", that aren't always being officially taught these days (e.g. basic "setting out" isn't a replacement for the more magical geometric constructions ... using only pencils, rulers, set-squares and compasses, and requiring little mathematical theoretical knowledge other than basic measurement along with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).

The bigger problem, is that, if we don't move on these "transferrable skills" soon, we will run out of people who have been taught them or learned them in the workplace, to teach others ...

gkenyon said:

The bigger problem, is that, if we don't move on these "transferrable skills" soon, we will run out of people who have been taught them or learned them in the workplace, to teach others ...

The only thing I do feel Graham is that it does seem as if that's been a concern for the 47 years I've been in the industry (scary!), but when it comes to recruiting graduates (for my sins I seem to be our lead graduate recruiter) we still find really, really good ones. Now that said, almost always the best ones have a mixture of University and work experience - but then 'twas ever thus, back when I was doing loads of STEM education work 25 years ago (again scary) I was always having to push to persuade school leavers to go for 4 year sandwich courses where they could, as I knew it made them so much more employable.

I think we do need to be a bit careful in making sure, when we try to ensure graduates have skills we have, that those skills are genuinely useful. Again, being involved in graduate mentoring a lot I find it's a really challenging question to work out what skills they actually need today. That fact that I use certain skills doesn't necessarily mean that those are the best ways to solve challenges, although of course sometimes they are.

However, more on the craft side I do thoroughly agree with you, although my concern there is actually less about what is being taught and more about it appearing that there are just fewer and fewer FE and apprenticeship opportunities available (possibly again related to my fourth answer above). 

Some of which may be our own fault as engineers in developing technology which very often no longer requires human craft skills in its manufacture, installation and maintenance, so the mass demand for craft skills has fallen? Just a thought. (Both of our cars are coming up for MOT time, and I believe that my much trusted car mechanic has sadly finally retired, which leaves me with the conundrum of finding someone else local who will actually look sensibly at how to sort out my 16 year old car rather than just plugging in a diagnostic tool and randomly replacing  - and charging me for - parts until it says "ok".)

gkenyon said:

The bigger problem, is that, if we don't move on these "transferrable skills" soon, we will run out of people who have been taught them or learned them in the workplace, to teach others ...

The only thing I do feel Graham is that it does seem as if that's been a concern for the 47 years I've been in the industry (scary!), but when it comes to recruiting graduates (for my sins I seem to be our lead graduate recruiter) we still find really, really good ones. Now that said, almost always the best ones have a mixture of University and work experience - but then 'twas ever thus, back when I was doing loads of STEM education work 25 years ago (again scary) I was always having to push to persuade school leavers to go for 4 year sandwich courses where they could, as I knew it made them so much more employable.

I think we do need to be a bit careful in making sure, when we try to ensure graduates have skills we have, that those skills are genuinely useful. Again, being involved in graduate mentoring a lot I find it's a really challenging question to work out what skills they actually need today. That fact that I use certain skills doesn't necessarily mean that those are the best ways to solve challenges, although of course sometimes they are.

However, more on the craft side I do thoroughly agree with you, although my concern there is actually less about what is being taught and more about it appearing that there are just fewer and fewer FE and apprenticeship opportunities available (possibly again related to my fourth answer above). 

Some of which may be our own fault as engineers in developing technology which very often no longer requires human craft skills in its manufacture, installation and maintenance, so the mass demand for craft skills has fallen? Just a thought. (Both of our cars are coming up for MOT time, and I believe that my much trusted car mechanic has sadly finally retired, which leaves me with the conundrum of finding someone else local who will actually look sensibly at how to sort out my 16 year old car rather than just plugging in a diagnostic tool and randomly replacing  - and charging me for - parts until it says "ok".)