Schools start skills revival
To achieve economic ambitions that rely on a highly skilled UK workforce, long-term solutions are required to tackle the challenges rooted in education, says YWE winner Titi Oliyide.
Most engineers can recall important factors in their life that helped set them on the path to their chosen career. Growing up in Nigeria, I was always curious about the transformation of ingredients into delicious meals during the cooking process, and enjoyed TV programmes about physics and mathematics that helped to cement what I was learning at school. When I was considering university courses, a chat with my sister’s friend who was studying engineering helped answer many of my questions and encouraged me to choose chemical engineering.
My family’s support and knowledge were invaluable during my degree. After graduating, I taught chemistry and maths to 13-16-year-olds for a year before moving to the UK for a postgraduate course. The students were always excited to learn about the real-world applications of the concepts and theories they were studying, something I could talk about based on knowledge from my degree and my work experience as a production engineering intern in the energy industry.
My master’s in chemical engineering at Imperial College London led to a job working on safety and reliability in industry. Today, after a range of projects around the world, I’m involved in developing the electrolysers that will underpin the emerging hydrogen industry.
Achieving chartered status through the IET was a career landmark, right up there with being named Young Woman Engineer (YWE) of the Year in 2023.
Research like last year’s IET Sustainability Skills Survey has shown repeatedly that a skills gap is one of the main obstacles to businesses achieving their decarbonisation ambitions. Getting young people interested in creating solutions to environmental problems isn’t the issue. The challenge, highlighted again and again, is how to turn that enthusiasm into a positive decision to consider doing it as a job.
Initiatives like the IET’s YWE Awards are very helpful in showing how people typically under-represented in industry have built successful careers. Increasing the number of people going into and remaining in engineering careers isn’t an end in itself. It is a key objective for the IET and should be for any country looking to build an industry that can remain competitive in the 21st century.
With a new government in power, policymakers would do well to revisit the IET’s 2022 Engineering Kids’ Futures report, which highlighted the vital importance of STEM subjects at school to delivering economic ambitions. Having people with the right background is key to creating a high-skill, high-wage economy, as well as tackling challenges like achieving net zero carbon emissions.
The missing link, the IET warns, is a lack of engagement in schools, coupled with a perception problem. Addressing these factors will help young people from all backgrounds better understand how STEM can be applied, close the education gap, increase their career aspirations and develop other skills such as creativity and problem-solving.
Engineering Kids’ Futures proposed a series of specific measures for schools in England that are as relevant today as they were in 2022. Perhaps the most fundamental is the need to review the National Curriculum to embed the teaching of engineering at both primary and secondary levels of education. Specific attention should be paid to the secondary school subject design and technology (D&T), refocusing it as ‘engineering and design’.
A key approach employed in more successful countries is embedding clarity in their technical education systems and the use of a full and diverse curriculum. The UK needs to start work to achieve this with a view to addressing its engineering skills gap. It won’t happen overnight; developing a robust pipeline of engineering talent needs to start with future generations.