Driven by new kinds of educational courses, fresh thinking, and the unavoidable necessity of embracing a more diverse catchment group to learn essential skills, some employers and institutions are creating new routes to engineering qualification. Can these approaches break down the ‘silo mentality’ of the professional institutions? Does computerisation become an enabler of opportunity, or does it dumb down the outcomes? And do we need to create a greener, more caring image (and reality) for the industry to close the ever-widening skill gap.
In this conversation, a panel of teachers, researchers and practitioners explore if the traditional courses are still relevant in a construction industry with a shrinking demographic and a competitive skills market. How do we attract a more diverse entry to the industry and, more importantly, does the industry need to address its image at the start – through new kinds of educational programmes?
Watch the recording of the Conversation below:
Lucy Sutcliffe, Senior Structural Engineer at Arup chaired the conversation. Whilst working as a structural engineer, Lucy developed an interest in how engineers learn throughout their career as well as the development of students and early career engineers. She is currently studying for an Engineering and Education MSc at the Institute of Education, UCL, in order to help understand how engineers learn at work.
Ed McCann, is a Senior Director at Expedition consulting engineers and current immediate past president of ICE. Ed has been involved in the education of engineers since 1999 where with Chris Wise he developed and delivered a pioneering program in Creative Design. He co-founded the Constructionarium initiative and was a Director of ThinkUp, where he co-authored Experience-led learning for engineers – a good practice guide for the Royal Academy of Engineering.
In setting the scene for the conversation he points out that we face new challenges, with new techniques and tools in an ever and fast changing context. He believes we need new and enhanced skills configured in new ways to meet those challenges. Our existing structures and practices for professional learning are not consistently effective or efficient in delivering the skills outcomes that society needs and therefore we need to improve. New knowledge about how people learn and new technology to support learning combine to enable developments in pedagogy that can greatly enhance the learning process in a manner that is both accessible and affordable to a diverse population. We urgently need to take advantage of these improved opportunities if we are to deliver positive societal impact.
Julie Bregulla is Director of Innovation at TEDI. As an expert in built environment safety, Julie’s work has been at the interface of practice, research, and regulatory process. Following studies in Germany, the US and UK she led BRE’s testing and certification arm before joining TEDI-London in 2021. Her work has spanned academia, consulting and contracting, giving her blended experience in the multi-faceted aspects of engineering practice.
TEDI London is an engineering higher education provider for future engineers, founded by Arizona State University, King’s College London, and UNSW Sydney, where she leads on innovation, partnerships, and projects. In their view future engineers are facing a very different professional life to the generations before them – increasingly interfacing engineering with evolving knowledge and other disciplines. The education of engineers needs to reflect this by encouraging diverse talent into engineering and prepare them by building their skills in context-rich and leading technical real-world challenges, enabling personal resilience, and training their ability to adapt.
Emanuela Tilley is Professor of Engineering Education and Director of the Integrated Engineering Programme at University College London. The Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP) is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed teaching framework embedded in the learning experiences of undergraduate students across UCL Engineering to better prepare them for tackling future global challenges. Educational Research is one of the key aspects of this and her current research interests include building a sense of social responsibility, skills development, and problem-based learning experiences of engineering students.
A key element of these courses is project-based learning: the students may have 9 major projects to undertake during the active learning process. The curriculum is made up of these core projects, not course modules. “It is not enough just to have a ‘capstone’ Project at the end of a 3-year course. From the students’ point of view, they are encouraged to personalise their own learning choosing from technical and non-technical topics which are common across all disciplines in the UCL engineering programme. Making maths and physics a tool rather than a barrier is once again a key strategic component of their approach.
Nick Ford is a neuro-divergent design engineer who runs a small multi-disciplinary design consultancy called Pipsqueak Developments. School didn’t work for him and his route into an engineering career was unconventional. He now actively recruits talented individuals whose brains also work differently.
Pipsqueak works for some extraordinary clients, including Kraft Heinz, Airbus, and the Science Museum, solving unusual 3D problems that push boundaries. They develop young people from being curious and talented individuals into engineers (or at the very least set them well and truly on the path). Many of them have not had great experiences with education in the past.
While he feels the traditional courses are becoming less and less relevant, the silo mentality is established before young people reach post-16 education. Schools failing to engage visual thinkers in an interactive environment is a ‘ticking time bomb’.
Having worked with primary and secondary schools for the past ten years, they have seen the troubles on the horizon. Our industry must commit – Pipsqueak invests 10% of their profit into training young people every year. If the whole engineering industry did this, the horizon would be brighter, he believes.
Dave Allen is Professor of Engineering Education and Head of Programme Development at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE), University of Hereford.
NMITE is a new Higher Education (HE) provider. As its first and therefore flagship programme, their MEng has been created using best practices used elsewhere in schools and HE, innovatively combining them to produce a unique pedagogical design, curriculum content and assessment approach. Revamping engineering education “requires commanding the whole problem, not just iterative efforts that barely strike a moving target.” It is not enough to make gradual, minor adaptations to existing educational models; rather, the change society needs requires a wholesale shift in mindset, pedagogy, and practice. The destination – graduating work-ready engineers – may be similar to that of other engineering programmes, but the NMITE road map is completely different. It has been drawn from scratch to take students on a journey whose landmarks include not only the achievement of technical skills, but also those of personal and professional development cited by recent governmental and professional body reports; broadening the diversity of students; strong emphasis on project work; industry engagement in design and delivery; experience of the workplace for students; and greater interdisciplinarity within and beyond engineering. All this is accomplished on an accelerated timetable taking students from entry to Master’s in only three years.
Audience discussion brought many responses and insights to these presentations. Many emphasised the need to engage with schools as one of the drivers of change as had been pointed out in the presentations. Some felt that the multidisciplinary aspect could go further in built environment course: co-learning with planners and architects for example. Some raise staff-student ratios as a possible barrier to this. But most of all the questions focused on how these new methods could address the problems of climate change and urgency of doing so.