Attracting and Training Tomorrow's Engineers

I do not think I would worry too much about attracting engineers to the field, this call usually goes out any time salaries begin to rise.

But extensive discussion about improvements was done in this thread.

1. should read 'make it fun'

Del

Unfortunately, when the teachers themselves do not have a good grasp or appreciation of science & engineering, how can they teach the students properly, or hope to inspire them towards such careers?

That has to start at the high school level at least, if not the Junior high school level. That way they can start taking the courses necessary.

My son's girlfriend is a student primary school teacher. She either hates or at best is indifferent to science. I'd expect all her students will quickly learn that science or engineering is boring and hard.

Rather than lower the standards to let more people who aren't interested pass engineering, we should let more kids discover how great engineering is.

Engineering is a calling as much as it is a profession.

The keys are: teachers and toys. The role of teachers has been discussed above but I think the proper kind of toys can be similarly important. In my childhood LEGO and the German Merklin could give the pleasure to construct, build almost everything. I would say that was a sort of introduction to engineering. The expensive ready-made "toys" cannot give the same experience.

I got into engineering (well, almost) when I visited a local technical school during their "open house". This was three days of demonstrating what the students learn in that school.

I gazed in amazement at rows of radios (tube types - still existing then); telephony using laser technology; a disc floating in midair (used coils of wire and electro-magnets); a large model train set with multiple tracks; a tour of the HAM radio room; classrooms filled with drawings by the drafting class; and the most fascinating for me (a non-mechanical nut) was a small car about five feet long with a real internal combustion engine and differential.

Everything was built and assembled by the students. The car, however, was a gift and arrived in pieces. The students assembled it themselves.

I was so impressed with it all that I knew that I wanted to be able to do the same things. Two years later, when I started high school, I asked my parents to enroll me in that school.

I've heard stories where kids took up engineering because they saw something that touched them somehow. It may have been something or someone they talked to that impressed them. That's what happened to me.

However, I also believe that not everyone is suited to a life in engineering. Just as I know that I will not make a good doctor or lawyer.

regards,

Vulcan

I have fond memories of great toys ( Tinker and Erector ) as well as great junk and tools to attack it with, but perhaps environment isn't all that big a factor, perhaps we just can't help ourselves.

But I gotta say, Vulcan's post does make one point clear; watching tubes heat up, hearing radio work, seeing trains run - all much more appealing to me even now than microcircuity and software.

Maybe one of the reasons schools should keep some analog around.

as illustration - which of us did not ooh and aah over Miniatur Wunderland blogpost?

The truth is there are some very good programs in the US, like FIRST, the Infinity Project, Vernier (which is more like a company and they're not only in the US) and others. They really do a good job getting the talented kids excited about engineering.

So why all the discussions about attracting more kids? Well, in my opinion, all of this is done in a closed circle. Meaning engineers talk about it, also some teachers get involved and if it stays at that level the word may never hit the streets.

For example, why dont' ASE, ASEE etc. get together, hire a top marketing team and put extremely powerful ads on main TV channels, geared at kids and their parents, for absolutely everyone to see the world needs engineers?

It looks pretty simple and obvious to me...

'cause we hate marketing?

Actually given that it is usually the firms that hire and the universities that train engineers that scream for more; I would have to wonder if we actually DO need more than we have.

Hey! My light bulb just turned on

I guess the fact that companies could develop more products if they had more engineers doesn't actually mean that it will be a good thing to have more engineers. Or if only 2-10% of high school graduates eventually become engineers is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe there are some attributes engineers need to have that are only in that 2-10% of high school graduates. We don't really know, do we?...

Actually, its been sitting right under my nose: the university I'm graduating from this year has been increasing its number of students in the last (at least) 10 years, mainly because of national government policies. And this big corporation that hires most of them has been complaining for years that the new graduates are getting worse and worse.

Some professors say its because students get hired before they graduate and they don't learn that much after that... I wonder if its because the same professors have been lowering their standards year after year? (which they openly confess) You know, more students means on average less "smartness"...

Bottom line: next time someone mentions a need for more engineers my reply will be "focus on quality, not quantity"!

It's not just the teachers but the system that the teachers need to work in as well.

Years ago, when my sister was still teaching High School Chemistry, I visited her in her class and sat in on a couple of her classes. I was wondering why she was teaching the kids to multiply and divide when she should have been teaching them chemical reactions or something.

She said that she had discovered that most of the kids didn't know those basic math skills or had difficulty with it! She couldn't teach them chemistry if they didn't know how to multiply and divide so she spent a couple of weeks of the first month teaching them.

I asked how they could have advanced out of elementary without these vital skills and she explained that some teachers needed to show that they were doing a good job by passing marginal students. The school faced closure or reduced budgets if only a certain quantity of students passed.

That's sad, very sad.

regards,

Vulcan

I can relate to this as I intended to go into commercial art thru high school, but once I was challenged by calculus, chemistry and physics I was hooked. I was fortunate to have many of my EE courses taught by the college of engineering dean who also had 12+ years of industry experience (always had excellent, real examples).

The experience influenced me to stay involved with with the local high school and college Program Advisory Committees to help with both course content planning and student interest influence. If we all make a just little effort, we can affect the reversal of the declining technology.

Just have the kids watch Star Trek for one hour each week. Scotty was the real hero since the Enterprise would have been destroyed every week if it wasn't for him fixing things.

In all seriousness - just remove the stigma that all engineers are super-genius nerds with pocket protectors by letting kids see that we are actually just smart people who like figuring out how to build and fix things. Then you won't have to entice kids to be engineers because they will want to be engineers.

First, as others have posted, engineering has to be demonstrated as interesting and exciting. Our society (especially TV) tends to claim the opposite.

Second, again as others have posted, we need secondary school teachers who have a clue about engineering. I tried to become a secondary teacher but was chased away because I didn't have any "touchy-feely" course credits; they were more worried about dealing with children's feelings than technical proficiency. It will be hard for engineers and technicians to break into the teacher's club that they have created.

Third many kids follow in their parents' footsteps, but many technical parents have not been treated very well by employers and so are not recommending it to their kids. Kids can see the stress their parents are under, and also realize that most engineers get spit out of the profession after only ten or fifteen years. Engineering certainly does not appear to be a stable and lucritive career, especially when compared to careers idolized on TV. We'll need a major societal attitude shift, embracing engineering rather than the current business "ethics", before we can fix that.

Time for a reality check on "letter to the editor of EE Times, one professional engineer"

"1. Improve elementary and secondary school education ....classes that .... develop engineering skills ..... "

And just how are you going to do that when it's not PC to have different classes for "different" students, not to mention the institutional uniformity legally mandated by "No child left behind"?

"2.....curricula that offer a broader education, in contrast to those that narrowly focus on engineering."

C'mon now. Employers don't give a hoot about Bulls--- filler courses. They measure job candidates by how challenging the curricula of the school they got their degree from. When it comes to people skills and such they look at demonstrated life experiences, not the course work on the resume. Besides, all the companies want is a pool of people they can groom to be brilliant and ruthless managers as well as a few really brainy engineers they keep in a closet to solve their worst technical problems.

" 3. ...Integrate work experience and education"

In this time of deep stress on businesses what company is going to hire an engineering intern on the chance that he/she might become an employee after graduating some years in the future? Oh, you say, companies should cooperate in programs to support the education of engineering students for future benefit? That worked very nicely 50 years ago when I was an engineering student in Newark, NJ. That kind of strategic thinking is a dead duck today in a world where most companies can't see past the end of next quarter or the expiration date of the CEO's stock options.

"4. ...offer a parallel, less intensive, curriculum ...."

That's fine; such programs are available at a lot of colleges right now. Problem is nobody wants to hire these people as anything more than drafters or technicians. And they are the first ones to get laid off because such people are not regarded as management strikers the way full blown "engineers" are.

"5. ...every engineering student is knowledgeable in statistics, problem solving, safety, and basic business"

Oh, PLEASE!! Teach them problem solving techniques in high school. This is a necessary life skill for everyone. Learning the technique does not mean that calculus is a prerequisite. Ditto basic statistics. This is stuff needed to live in our complex world. Easily integrated into any basic high school math or algebra course and if done right will be the most interesting part of the course because the information is immediately applicable in everyday life. Safety and basic business? High school stuff. In college make them take a business law course. If you scare the hell out of the kids they will learn on their own how to stay out of jail, bankruptcy or getting fired for doing something really stupid. College courses in safety will not convince any company legal departments to stop the safety training programs for new hires.

"6. Teach and publicize the value of engineering and the opportunities open to those choosing the field.?"

This is the only recommendation in the list that I agree with. In the interest of full disclosure I should note my investment position in an S&P 500 broad market fund. So it is in my interest to see more and therefore cheaper engineers available to companies that need to hire such people. But the other way of looking at this one is that better publicity will be good for the few people that are really suited for an engineering career but are in the part of their life when they are making career choices and don't recognize engineering course as being the course to take.

Please pardon my heavy dose of cynicism; but in today's world we truly need to get the feet of the hopeless dreamers back on the ground. We desperately need for the majority of us to get in touch with the real world and knock off the addiction to dream sequences.

Ed Weldon