Articles
As the baby-boom generation of engineers accelerates towards retirement, employers are competing to attract replacement staff. All industry sectors are affected, especially energy, aerospace and defence.
There is a significant lack of engineers in the crucial 30- to 45-year age group who are needed to take over the reins. This is the generation that should have the experience and knowledge to provide today’s project team leaders.
But the recession of the 1990s and resulting redundancies, outsourcing and cutbacks in training meant that some key competencies and specialisations were not passed on. And many engineers deserted the profession.
The conveyor belt of new graduates is slowing down, and lack of employment skills and experience is deterring employers from taking them on. A controversial study by Birmingham University showed that, a year after graduation, 44% of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates are either unemployed or working in jobs that do not require degrees.
The challenge is to bridge the skills gap between the “boomers,” their 30- to 45-year-old successors, and young graduate engineers – or engineers transferring across into a new sector for the first time. New methods and tools are needed to support engineering teams with the resources to research new disciplines, share knowledge, and improve the employability skills among graduates.
These concerns were raised in a recent webinar, Bridging the Engineering Skills Gap, hosted by Knovel. Dr Allan Colquhoun, university liaison and emerging technologies manager at Selex Galileo, outlined how formal and informal “knowledge capture” techniques have been introduced to record the expertise of retiring engineers. Online resources, such as Knovel, can support this sort of knowledge management initiative.
Today the web is the first place to search for answers, but can be a no-go area for engineers owing to concerns about compliance with quality and safety standards. The lack of an audit trail and unvalidated information sources present serious problems. To help engineers overcome these issues, Knovel was founded more than 10 years ago to provide only validated technical reference information and to make data interactive, so that engineers can manipulate it by exporting graphs, equations and tables into their workflow. Knovel rigorously vets data from the most trusted sources, and only includes information relevant to practising engineers, such as from professional societies and publishers.
Big employers, including BP, Arup and Rolls-Royce, are some of the 700-plus companies that have adopted Knovel. Many professional societies, including the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, provide aspects of Knovel as a service to their members.
A Deloitte report, Making the Grade 2011, calls for revolutionary thinking from universities to stay competitive. One measure it recommends is more strategic use of web-based interaction for students. Many university engineering departments are already doing this – for example, Knovel is used in more than 400 universities worldwide, including 30 in the UK.
With new engineers intuitively using online tools and sharing knowledge instantly, using similar tools to those encountered in industry can help to ease the training process and the transition to employment.
While online resources are just one of the tools for bridging the knowledge gap, they will remain a key source in helping engineers to wise up on topics quickly, so they can find their own answers.