Was that the week that was?
10 March 2009
I am sure we are all aware that we are in the middle of the National Science and Engineering Week. We are all aware, aren’t we?
Well in truth, I was not, at least not until I heard a one-minute feature on the radio about astronomy last Friday (6th March) on the first day of this engineering extravaganza. National Science and Engineering Week (formerly National Science Week) is, according to its website, a ‘10 day programme of around 3500 events running throughout the whole of the UK with the aim of celebrating science, engineering and technology and its importance in our lives.’ To which you can only say hurrah to that and I hope it works.
I wonder, however, if we are really ‘seizing a moment’ and taking the opportunity of re-establishing science and engineering in the top table of aspirational jobs. Without stomping over old ground or trying to deal with all of society’s ills in one article, I think the consensus would be that modern society is obsessed by celebrity and wealth, and yet is less inclined to work hard, carve out a career, and get suitably rewarded. Many youngsters want a fast track to a highly paid job and the obvious ways of doing this, as presented by all forms of media, are through celebrity or the City. How many brilliant minds have been ‘wasted’ doing Film Studies at university when they could have been great scientists or engineers? Given that this newsletter goes exclusively to electronics designers then I am sure that I am preaching to the converted on this as most of you will share my bias.
This argument is nothing new of course and maybe rather than look at it as a failure from the technology sectors we should appreciate that, at least until very recently, the UK’s financial sector has been phenomenally innovative and good at what it does – no wonder young people have been attracted by it. Now everything has changed. The financial sector is seen to be driven by greed and self-interest and the dangers of unregulated capitalism are now clear for all to see. Those who work in the financial sector now have to worry about job security rather than over-inflated bonuses.
So does the tarnished image of the financial sector leave the door open for other sectors of the economy? Is this an opportunity for the engineering and science sectors to become appealing again? Quite simply, yes!
There is never a shortage of children, particularly but not exclusively boys, who have an inherent fascination with making things, understanding how things work, fixing things, and indeed, breaking things. However, these early seeds of creativity are often sidelined as all those compulsory hours of multi-cultural studies and endless testing take over. Hopefully events like the National Science and Engineering Week, for all that it may have passed by large segments of the adult population, will play a part in stimulating and inspiring youngsters to pursue an engineering career path.
Sowing the early seeds is one thing, but there must be a garden for the seeds to grow in as well, if I am not stretching the metaphor too far. The UK has to a certain degree become a design centre for electronics. Manufacturing having been exported to whatever the lowest cost geography is at the time. What worries me about this is that design and manufacturing feed off each other and, after a while, one without the other starts to decline. Critical elements of design are fed back from the manufacturer and increasingly offshore manufacture will spawn offshore design. In truth that is what happened in the development of the UK industry, as many of the US companies saw Scotland and Ireland as an inroad to Europe and brought with them expertise which remained after they left and migrated still further east.
The point is that now is the time for the government to be investing in manufacturing. It may not seem obvious at a time when few people have the confidence to spend any money on manufactured goods, but surely this has got to be a the time when we need to look at the foundations of what the British economy is built on. If it is built on the endless transferring of worthless bits of paper, as it was before, then the future is not too bright. On the other hand, if we nurture our engineering talent and create a viable manufacturing industry then those foundations start to seem a lot more solid.
And before you think I am going down the route of flag-waving protectionism, I am not. All I think is needed is recognition of what should be manufactured locally, in terms of proximity to original design and end market, or from environmental or financial considerations, and provide a platform to do it on. Education, apprenticeships, easier corporate management (not all good engineers are so good at running companies!), less bureaucracy, easier access to finance, better links between academia and industry and better use of our excellent academic institutions – there are a host of initiatives, most of which have been tinkered with in the past, that could make a real difference if developed as part of a co-ordinated and committed programme.
The government’s approach to protectionism should not be to promote it in this country, but to ensure that it does not exist anywhere in the global community.
And finally, to come round to the initial point, if an industry is successful and growing, it will have the right image to attract the bright young minds of the future.
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