Why don’t youngsters want to be engineers?

One of the ironies of Boris Johnson’s ambition to “Build Back Better” and “Level Up” is that the UK simply does not have enough engineers and technicians to do the building back better, even if we knew what it meant.

Quite apart from the acute labour shortages for lorry drivers and hospitality workers triggered by lockdown and Brexit, the country is bedevilled by a chronic and structural shortage of engineering graduates and other skilled technical workers, and particularly acute for apprentices. 

As Rhys Morgan, director of education and engineering at the Royal Academy of Engineering, puts it: “While the government’s targets for a net zero economy and the broader ambitions for infrastructure are to be welcomed, these will not be met with the current supply or trajectory of UK engineering skills – at both technician and graduate levels.”

Here’s why. The UK needs 124,000 more workers with engineering or technology core competencies each year to meet current needs, let alone the demand from newer, cutting-edge industries such as hydrogen renewables, carbon capture or the giga-battery plants being planned. 

On top of this shortfall, the latest Engineering UK report says another 79,000 “related” roles requiring a mixed application of engineering knowledge and skills alongside other skill sets are needed to be able to complete work in the pipeline.

It also estimates a shortfall of between 37,000 and 59,000 in meeting the annual demand for core engineering roles requiring Level 3+ skills: equivalent to A-levels. Yet, surprise surprise, since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy by George Osborne – designed to attract more apprentices – the overall number of engineering apprenticeships has fallen. 

According to the Royal Academy, in 2019, there were 24,000 apprentices who completed an intermediate level 2 (GCSE equivalent) engineering apprenticeship, 33,000 who finished the advanced level 3 (A-level equivalent) and 2,100 who completed a higher level 4+ (HND to degree level).

But that’s not enough. As Morgan points out, the apprenticeships taken at level 3 and above are mostly over 19 years old. This, he says, essentially means that employers are putting existing staff on apprenticeships to recoup the money they are paying into the apprenticeship levy. “While it is helping to make existing staff more productive, it’s not actually creating more people with engineering skills. So it doesn’t address the skills shortages in terms of numbers of people.” While well-intentioned, Osborne’s levy was one of those policies that ended up with an own goal.

There are big problems at graduate level too. The number of youngsters studying for an engineering degree has been flat-lining at about 18,000 a year – some 5 per cent of the total cohort of university students – for the last 20 years. Add to this another 2,000 or so physics graduates each year who go on to work in manufacturing. 

But despite huge efforts by government, industry and organisations such as the Royal Academy, the number of graduate engineers has barely budged. 

Even if every single engineering graduate who is eligible were to go into engineering in the UK on graduation – and not be snapped up by City firms offering them triple the salary – there would still be an annual shortfall of 22,000 graduates.

Yet this gap is not because young engineers don’t like their chosen subject – around 85 to 90 per cent of all those who study the subject move into industry and stay. Salaries are decent – average starting pay is around £30K while mid-ranking engineers earn £60K and upwards and plumbers are making £80K plus.

Some would say that if there is such a demand for engineers, then the market will supply the answer – by raising salaries. This is easier said than done since most big engineering companies are contracted by the government, and already work on the finest of margins.

That means finding other ways of attracting more into industry. Every trick in the trade has been tried to entice pupils and students into the profession – employers are now visiting more schools than ever to get the word out. Teachers are being primed about the industry, there has been a clean-up of the thousands of different NVQ qualifications with the new T-levels and more resources are finally going into Further Education colleges.  

At the Royal Academy of Engineering, the new chief executive, Dr Hayaatun Sillem, has put attracting the young into the industry one of her top priorities. Part of the campaign is a new series of video, titled “This is Engineering,” which is being pushed out into social media to show youngsters how being an engineer is an adventurous career, one that can open the door to industries as diverse as working on wind farms or Twitter.

As well as hoping to attract more females (just 14 % per cent of engineers are women), the Academy hopes to reach those from a more diverse background. So far the videos have had an astonishing 54 million views but its too early to say whether this latest push, alongside all the other activities going on in schools, will lead to students taking up engineering as a career. We can only hope so.  

Britain is not the only Western country to suffer from such shortages of talent. Across the US and Europe governments and companies are finding the same problem. Even Germany, that beacon of engineering with its great Mittelstang manufacturers, is finding it difficult to draw the young into the new technologies such as biotech or renewables. 

By contrast, India and China continue to pour resources into training a new generation of engineers – many of them coming to the UK’s top universities for their post-graduate studies – while studying the discipline in developing African countries is seen as a national imperative and, indeed, a sign of status. 

There are multiple and complex reasons why the young in the UK, and other Western nations, are shunning the subject: part historical, part social and cultural, but there are also issues with poor perceptions and lack of knowledge.

A recent YouGov poll for MakeUK, the UK’s trade organisation for the industry, asked a group of people where they would rank the UK as a manufacturing nation. The average ranking chosen was 58th. Britain is of course ninth in the world – Kazakhstan takes 58th position.

So what’s gone wrong with our national perception of the industry? Ever since Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the first national attempt to put manufacturing prowess on an equal standing with the arts, the British have flip-flopped all over the place in their attitude to manufacturing and industrial creativity. 

An astonishing six million people visited the Great Exhibition during its six month run out of the then population of 17.9 million. Back then manufacturing captured the imagination as magical and innovative; as the historian and MP, Thomas Macaulay, wrote after visiting the exhibition in Hyde Park: “I made my way into the building, a most gorgeous sight; vast, graceful, beyond the dream of the Arabian romances. I cannot think that the Caesars ever exhibited a more splendid spectacle.”  

The great industrialists and engineers were the celebrities of the day, men who went on to make great fortunes, joining the landed gentry and buying up swathes of country homes and land. 

Maybe the way the captains of industry – who made their fortunes from grubby trade – were able to buy their way into the gentry is one of the reasons we as a nation still struggle with where engineering fits into the social fabric. Who knows, but somehow being an engineer is still not perceived as being as valuable as so many other professions.

Typically, the brightest choose medicine, law or the humanities if they want to make it to the top of the establishment – not engineering. Does that sniffy, if not downright snobby, attitude still hold today? 

Who better to ask than Sir John Parker, naval engineer, former president of the Royal Academy and serial chairman of some of Britain’s biggest companies. Parker agrees there is a legacy issue surrounding how engineering is seen as a profession, and would like to see the government do far more to view our engineering skills base as a strategic national asset. 

What is obvious is that we need to see more joined up thinking between the Department of Education, the Department of Business and the Treasury, and working closer with industry. 

But it’s not all bad news. Much is being done at the ground level to change perceptions – in schools, amongst employers, trade groups, as well as parents, who are still one of the greatest influencers over what their offspring choose as a career – to build up what’s known as science capital. 

Several Russell Group universities are in talks with the Office of Students to see whether dropping maths and physics at A-level for students applying for engineering would be a way of attracting more youngsters into the discipline. The logic being that, if youngsters are bright, universities can teach those subjects alongside core competences. 

It takes time but attitudes can be shifted: A-level maths – because it is now recognised as a marker of high attainment – is now the most popular A-level of all. So social and peer pressure does work. 

As well as the Catapult centres and Institutes of Technology expanding, there are also moves to make universities take on more apprentices as degree students. It’s a hobby-horse of Robert Halfon, chair of the Education Select Committee, who has done more than anyone in government to push improving skills to the top of the agenda as well as pushing for changes to the levy system.

There’s something else that could be done. No one is sure what being an engineer means: Is it a trade? A profession? Is it the young plumber who fixes the heating system or the brain who comes up with the most brilliant MRI scanner which saves lives? The answer is both.

Engineer comes from the Latin, ingeniator, which derives from ingeniare which is to create or devise, and from ingenium, meaning cleverness. If we value the next generation of ingeniators: they, like the medical profession, should be given the title of doctor once they are fully qualified. That might do the trick. And another Great Exhibition, perhaps.