The engineering skill shortage

‘There’s a disconnect between opportunities and what’s being taught’

Jane MacMaster is the chief engineer at Engineers Australia, the industry’s main professional body.

The short answer is there’s a significant issue. I used to say that this topic is being mentioned daily, but it’s now getting to the stage where it’s almost every meeting. Everyone I talk to in the industry raises pretty much exactly the same concern. Whenever I meet a chief engineer and ask them what are the main challenges they’re facing, almost exclusively skills shortages crop up as the most important issue. I think delaying some projects is one implication that we’re seeing. In other areas, we’re seeing people being promoted into more senior positions, probably before they’re ready, and before they’ve had the ideal number of years of experience.

School kids are getting exposed to STEM concepts and subjects, including engineering. In fact, EA just made a joint submission to the ACARA curriculum review, and I was happily surprised to see quite a few engineering concepts and principles in the curriculum. So, they are being taught. But the word engineering is not used very much. And so, what we suspect is that there’s a disconnect between what they’re being taught and what opportunities there are for an engineering career.

Students and teachers aren’t really making the connection between some of those engineering ideas and engineering as a profession. Having said that, I also don’t think maths is taught enough in the later years of high school. There are some other factors that come into it. We’ve probably got enough STEM teachers, but STEM is changing rapidly. Teachers need to be able to inspire students to understand how these seemingly theoretical concepts – especially in maths and some sciences – can be applied to real-world scenarios. How is a mathematical formula going to help me design a rocket or calculate how fast something flies or how strong something is? So, there’s probably some tweaks in our curriculum and teaching methods that could inspire more students to be interested in STEM, but also so that they become more aware of what engineering is. We often say that the engineering ‘E’ in STEM is actually quite distinct from the S, T and M.

We’ve got a long way to go address a lack of women in engineering. We’re actually kicking off a big research project at the moment to really delve into and understand the factors cause women to choose to study engineering or not. And we’re looking at males as well to understand if there are any differences. But because of the looming skill shortage, we want to understand what those factors are for both genders so that we can use those as levers to encourage a stronger pipeline of people studying engineering in the future. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re definitely doing some work.

I’m also chairing a task force that is looking solely at what levers we can use to increase female participation. I think part of the reason for a lack of women is that as a profession, we still don’t answer the question, “What do engineers do and what is engineering” very well. Part of the problem is that it’s a very broad profession. We touch on just about all sectors and disciplines, and the number of job types within the engineering profession is also extremely broad, ranging from planning, design, test, builds, commissioning, operations, maintenance and decommissioning. Those job types are quite different.

As a professional, we also tend to be a little bit behind the scenes. People engage with the work of engineers, almost every second or minute of the day, because technology is all-pervasive at the moment. But we don’t really interact with people to the same extent that lawyers, doctors and teachers do. And so it’s a little bit more obscure, I think, to school students in particular, about what it is that engineers do. And one of the questions I’m asking as many engineers as I come across is, “What was it that that made you choose to study engineering?” More often than not people cite that they knew an engineer, and they heard the stories of the work that they did. And it was knowing about the type of work that they did that inspired them to do something along the lines of engineering as well.

As a profession, we need to get better at telling the stories about the types of problems that we solve and the type of work that we do. Because at that point, I think we’ll inspire more women and men to choose to study engineering because it really is about solving problems and achieving outcomes. And because it’s such a broad profession, there’s almost no limit to the type of problems that you can solve with engineering. And it’s a very transferable skill set as well. It’s very easy to get a job in another sector with an engineering degree.

Another part of the problem is that many people think that science is the discipline that gets you there. And again, it comes back to a greater awareness of what engineering is. We’ve got to do a better job at connecting those exciting job opportunities with engineering. The word engineering derives from ingenuity: cleverness in design. I think we’ve got to improve on making the connection to a lot of new and emerging job opportunities. And who knows where technology is going to take us in the next 10 or 20 years? Our research has shown that teachers and career advisers need to make the connection between those exciting job or career opportunities to engineering as well, because the role of influencers in young people’s lives is proving to be quite important.

About 58.5 per cent of the engineering workforce are skilled migrants in Australia. We have relied for a very long time on them to make up our engineering workforce. So, the impact of border closures has been real. It’s been great in some sectors more than others. It hasn’t impacted defence, for example, because they’re less able to rely on skilled migrants because of their security clearance requirements, with citizenship and so forth. And while we should remember that this avenue, hopefully, will be available to us again, we also need to put a lot more effort into strengthening the pipeline of our domestically trained engineers. Because with all the engineering related initiatives in the pipeline, whether it’s advanced manufacturing, or our infrastructure pipeline, or innovation more broadly, it’s all going to require engineers.

We need an engineering workforce strategy and that would encompass a range of factors. And we need to look from primary school through to secondary school and higher education. We need to incentivise students to choose to study engineering and also get a better understanding of which sectors and skillsets are in high demand. Now, some of that we already know, for example: software engineering, digital defence, power systems, construction, railway signalling. But the data that we have is largely anecdotal. If I was within government, I would try and set up some systems to get a better picture of the future demand for these skills and then importantly link that through to the universities and also school students. Students need a picture of which professions and career types are going to be most in-demand in the future and know where they can study those courses.

‘The language could be more accessible’

Professor Maurice Pagnucco is the deputy dean of the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW. He was previously the head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering from July 2010 to September 2019.

It is a pretty big issue, to be honest. You’ll see that in the labour predictions: engineering is an area where it is anticipated there will be shortages. We’re obviously trying to do a lot of programmes to get kids interested in science and engineering, but I’m not sure what the perception is.

A lot of the students’ parents will be professionals, so they get less exposure to building things and tinkering. But I also think there’s less opportunity to do that than when I was young. There’s a lot more concern around health and safety, which while really important, also takes away from actually fiddling with things. I remember quite some time ago I had a laptop and it just died all of a sudden. But the interesting thing was when they sent someone over to fix it, and he opened the machine, you realise that it’s all on one board, so there’s not much to pull apart. You look at your cars nowadays and everything’s a lot more complicated and sophisticated. And so, I think your ability to pull stuff apart is also hampered somewhat, because when things were screwed together in the old days, you could unscrew them and try and put them back together. Whereas nowadays, manufacturing is so much more sophisticated.

Aviation is often heralded as a really great example of what engineering is. And that’s because in the early days, you just had the sort of hobbyists that were trying to fly. In the Wright brothers’ time, it was real: a collective of people just experimenting and sharing their thoughts on flying machines and so on. It was then a pretty short period of time in the grand scheme of things from going from that to commercial airliners.

We do have an issue in attracting women to engineering. At the moment, just around 30 per cent of our student cohort is women. Why don’t they find it an attractive area? Is it because it’s too difficult? No. If you look at the HSC results, you see women doing fantastically well in areas like maths, so coming in doing something like engineering shouldn’t really be that difficult. But for whatever reason, they don’t.

In a lot of areas, you get jargon, and it’s like you’re only in the club if you can understand it. People hear all this talk and you just don’t really know what’s going on. A lot of the language could be a little bit more accessible. In computing, for instance, you have a lot of acronyms. Having talked to some of our female students before, some of them seem daunted because of the fact that they didn’t really do any programming when they were teenagers. And then they hear all this jargon being spat it out, and they just go, “Oh no, I don’t know any of these, so it’s going to be too hard. I’ll go and do something else.” Let’s simplify the language and make it more accessible.

I’m not sure whether we have a lack of teachers, but we certainly have an issue with the curriculum in high schools. We must make it interesting to students. A couple of years’ back, I went and talked to some people in the NSW education department, but when they showed me the enrolments in technology subjects in high school, their graph was going down, it wasn’t going up. Students are already turning off in high school, and are not interested in technology. It’s about the language and making it accessible to students and getting them interested.

We should also try to explain to students that it’s not as hard as it might seem. I think some people are turned off a little bit by the perception that this is really hard. It’s beyond me, I don’t have the ability! And I think some students are turned off at a really early age when they shouldn’t be because I think they do have the ability. With some of the women who I was talking to, I just got the feeling that what they’re saying is, “If I was into this earlier, I would understand the jargon, but now it’s a bit too late and it’s going be difficult for me to catch up.” So, the tricky bit is how do you simplify the language?

We see a lot of our students go overseas too, by the way, including to big IT firms. One of the things that we do at UNSW is a student project on solar cars, because UNSW pioneered a lot of technology in solar cells. And there’s an international race from Darwin to Adelaide every two years. One of the guys who was a president of one of the teams got hired by Tesla. The business was then so impressed with this kid that they came here the next year and started trying to recruit people to go to the US and work with them.

‘There are great opportunities’

Greg Edmonds is the chief executive at New Zealand-based Salus Aviation Group, which offers MRO support for rotary and fixed-wing aircraft.

Pre-pandemic issues, we would be importing the majority of our skilled workers. South Africa was a big drawcard for us, the UK, a little bit across the Tasman as well as some out of Asia and the Middle East. But we would have had probably 60 or 70 per cent of our workforce from offshore contractors who come and live and settle in New Zealand. And so, particularly from a South African perspective, it was a reasonably simple task to attract people.

Right now, it is at its absolute crisis point. I think the government announced last night that our unemployment dropped below 4 per cent for the first time in over a decade. And that’s across the entire employment market. But for us, we see in the industry that people are moving between competitors, and that’s about it.

We can’t get anybody in. You cannot get a MIQ (hotel quarantine) spot into New Zealand to travel here for any reason, let alone to try and emigrate for special purposes. It is an absolute challenge at the moment and something that the industry is continuing to lobby the government on because ultimately, we’re running out of skilled workers.

New Zealand has taken its foot off the pedal in terms of apprenticeship training and engineering training. Over the last two decades, we have let the market do what it wanted to do, rather than providing incentives for organisations to train apprentices into their industries. Aviation is actually no different. What we’re finding now is that lack of investment over the last 10 or 15 years or so, combined with the fact that a number of skilled workers within the aviation industry are choosing to move out of aviation because of the pandemic. I think we’ve got a really big problem. The emphasis has to go back to sovereignty. Young kids need to come out of school with a view that aviation, engineering and trades as actually good industries to be in.

In the future, I think jobs will be different to what they are at the moment. Emerging technologies in the aviation sector mean soon the reality will be that the powertrains are going to be different, airframes are going to be different and propulsion is all going to be slightly different to what it is at the moment. To me, that’s exciting, because I think it’s going to make it more affordable to actually fly and move products or people around the place. There are definitely great opportunities. The avionics world is changing every day.

It’s just getting more and more advanced from what we had in the old days. And I think younger people need to be educated on the opportunities within the aviation sector going forward, which we’re not doing such a great job on at the moment. We’re on the cusp of a massive change but there are still a number of challenges around when and how unmanned aircraft will be used in the future. There’s no doubt that drones are no longer a toy that you fly on the beach. They are commercially built and manufactured equipment that is going to displace, in the future, a lot of work that’s done by the likes of rotary aircraft.

I see an immediate emerging challenge around what I call the convergence between fixed-wing light aircraft and rotary-wing aircraft. So, when we talk about eVTOL, to me, I see private aircraft owners who own a Cessna 172 or PA 28, for their own private use, will instead buy one of those aircraft in the future. Because of course, a traditional aircraft requires a runway, whereas the eVTOL doesn’t, but it still flies like an aircraft. So that’s where the immediate change is going to take place. Not so much with unmanned aircraft, but actually, I want to fly my own machine. And now I can fly eVTOL, which gives me vertical take-off and landing capability, but the flight experience of the range of fixed-wing aircraft.