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The engineering skills gap – how to bridge it

 

By Derek Carpenter, MD, Datasound Laboratories Limited

Depending on your definition, the internet has been around for almost thirty years now and has certainly been in common business use for at least fifteen of these. It has revolutionised the way we play, shop and communicate, and has totally transformed the way we do business. Who can remember the last time they sent a fax? How drastically does productivity drop when email is not working? Who can now imagine carrying out research without the help of Google or another search engine?

So, business practices have been transformed, yet despite the many positives the Internet has brought us, there are certain areas in which its influence has not been so good. One such area is the effect it has had on electronic design engineering.

The advent of the Internet, especially in the dot.com era, robbed the electronics industry of a generation of engineers, who chose the perceived coolness (and financial rewards) of web design as a career against the perhaps less glamorous but far more demanding life of an electronics design engineer.

This blinkered approach to career selection has led to two things. Firstly, there are now far more web designers in the world than could ever realistically be needed. Secondly, and more importantly, there is a serious shortage of properly trained and experienced engineers who can not only understand and apply basic principles of electronics design but also have a practical, common sense approach to good quality board design.

Part of the problem is one of perception. Even now, web design has a cool factor that electronic engineering will never be able to compete with. This is despite the fact that a career in the latter can be more rewarding, interesting and challenging.

But why do we need more engineers? Surely the rise of off the shelf solutions means that there is a vast choice of PC/104, Compact PCI & EBX form factor products on the market that do not need customisation? Perhaps, but despite this there are also many applications where cost, space, shape or functionality conflicts mean that these standard form factor products are not suitable. 

The combination of this and the skills shortage has led to OEMs increasingly turning to custom design specialists for their design needs. As a business decision this does make sense – a specialist already has the relationships with chipset suppliers, the varied experience required to work with different products and tools and have proven development processes that drive down risk.

So there are many opportunities for someone to really make a mark, yet if the shortage continues there are long-term repercussions for the industry. And the problem is not just going to go away either. Around 25 percent of the industry's most experienced design engineers will retire within the next 5-10 years, with little sign that they are being replaced with new starters. This will create a potentially serious deficit if more young people are not attracted into the profession.

One solution has been to hastily insert ‘milk run’ recruited graduates into the gap - but because of the lack of real world experience, the engineering foundations are not there and the end product can suffer. Another has been to recruit from overseas. This is fine in the short term, but is not a long-term solution by any means.

So what can the industry do make itself more appealing? Initially, the introduction of new apprenticeship opportunities would be a good start. This can be done either as an industry initiative, or even something done regionally by firms in the electronics sector via the local press, but it is vital to give people the required grounding, and an apprenticeship is a perfect way of doing this.

When attracting graduates, companies should look much closer at sponsorship opportunities.  The sponsoring of a graduate throughout their course by a custom design company will provide benefits to all parties.

The student will have help with (depending on the level of sponsorship) tuition fees, a bursary, contributions to spend on course materials, and work placements during the holidays.

The sponsor gets to guide the graduate during university holidays, helping to mould them into what is required for a successful career in electrical engineering, and gets the benefit of this for a fixed period of time after graduation. And finally, the industry gets a highly skilled engineer with both the academic and practical skills needed to make an impact in the workplace.

However, I firmly believe that the main problem is one of communication. Whilst engineering will probably never be the cool option, emphasising the many benefits of a career in electronic engineering has got to be the way forward.  There is actually a demand for engineers (unlike web design), it pays well, the industry is growing and opportunities are many.  If that can be communicated effectively then the skills gap in electronic engineering that is emerging may be bridged – if not than the problem is to get much worse.