Stephen Tetlow: Lessons to be learnt as engineering crisis looms

Engineers are integral to all UK industries, including food production and healthcare as well as aerospace and offshore renewable energy generation. Engineering accounts for 24.5 per cent of all enterprises in the UK – it turns over more than three times the retail sector at £1.1 trillion a year. Engineers lie at the very heart of our advanced society. We won’t be able to build a strong economy for the future if we don’t nurture the right skills for the long term.

On the face of it, the latest figures from the Engineering Council look good, with the number of new professional engineers across the country growing by 17 per cent last year. The number of students entering graduate engineering courses also increased by six per cent.

But with the ageing workforce and so many retiring from engineering, the total number of engineers and technicians in the UK increased by only three individuals. Given that we need 100,000 new professionals each year to give our country any chance of sustainable growth for the future, this leaves a massive shortfall. In fact, in 2013 we were 36,000 short of the professional engineers we need.

While the Government is starting to grasp the issue, I’m not convinced we, as a whole, are doing enough or doing it fast enough. We need to scale up our efforts significantly, urgently and strategically. If we don’t grow the skills available here in the UK, the work will go elsewhere.

There is a huge amount of effort being made to attract more people into engineering careers. There are great organisations and charities working with schools and industry, such as Primary Engineer and the Big Bang which connects over 60,000 schoolchildren with employers every year. The £1m Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and the Bloodhound land speed record attempt are also helping to put engineering in the spotlight. But this is nowhere near enough.

Careers advice in schools on the opportunities in engineering is hopelessly un-coordinated and may well do more to confuse rather than enthuse the next generation. We need to inspire young people, particularly women, and show them that engineering is a great, exciting, challenging profession in which you really can improve the lives of people – and make good money.

All this has to start in our schools. We need to dispel the myth that physics and maths – the subjects that underpin engineering – are boring or irrelevant. Half of our state co-ed schools do not produce any girls with physics A-levels at all, and only five per cent of all professional engineers are women. This is not only a disgrace, it’s a waste of talent. Schoolchildren need to be taught in context, not abstract, by teachers who understand how exciting engineering really is.

The capacity of both higher education and further education needs to be increased with a regime change in funding mechanisms and priorities.

Employers also need to do much more to open themselves up to schools in a co-ordinated way to show just how rewarding and varied jobs in engineering and science can be.

We must find ways to make it more attractive for industry, especially smaller companies, to develop meaningful relationships with schools and colleges. In Germany, local employers provide rich opportunities for work experience, and students are taught about the country’s labour market. We should do the same here.

The nation needs to grasp the fact that the UK’s engineering skills base is now facing the cliff-edge. Government, employers, professional engineering institutions and academia must get together and urgently accelerate moves to boost the number of people working towards careers in engineering and manufacturing. Crucially, the drive to develop more UK engineers needs to be based on buy-in from all political parties, so that we can reverse this long-term decline in our technical heritage. We have so much to gain if we get this right and so much to lose if we don’t.

Stephen Tetlow is chief executive of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.