Abstract
Fully Supportive on the Attitude Towards ‘Diversity’
Within the field of engineering, I can’t see the necessity for any big focus on ‘diversity’ among people even though the official words tend to be ‘in order that we get the best people’.
I can appreciate this as being the case in areas such as leading scientific research, top-level surgery, professorships at universities, in top performing arts and among professional sports individuals. All these being professions where true and outstanding talent is spotted at an early age and given special training and education by the very highest educators – probably in the West – to enable such individuals to become leading performers: Actually singled out as being world class ‘soloists’ more than ‘team players’!
Engineering is more of a slog of following proven best practices and gaining extensive experience of the craft. Genius in finding shortcuts to save time and money is not necessarily best practice. It suits companies with a micro-managed, financial and political focus. I am pretty sure that global engineering companies mainly force ‘diversity’ policies on their workforces as a good political move in order to keep themselves popular with the foreign governments in the various countries where they build engineering projects. It could well be an asset to have a ‘native’ project leader and some of the local workforce employed on the project since they know their country’s terrain and climatic environment. But the driving force behind the concept will be to keep costs down and to win further business around the world. Splitting up projects between different offices, however, is a natural disaster despite all the supposed advantages of electronic media/communications. This applies to within the United Kingdom as well as between separate continents. It is also now politically correct to be focussed on saving the environment, but driven by the knowledge that huge financial fines can be forced upon offending companies which is both an immediate cost as well as a future penalty if business is lost by the bad reputation so gained. A key skill is an ability to see through all the C21st ‘bullshit’.
Engineering in the United Kingdom is so low key, in terms of advanced work, that we only require quite ordinary professional practitioners. Unfortunately, gaining good practitioners must be increasingly difficult because of what used to be our core engineering crafts having been surrendered to more competitive overseas manufacturers and providers. It is the continual practice of designing and building things that maintain the necessary skills and increase quality from the ‘lessons learnt’ while sustaining and developing trained workforces. This in itself would appear to be the main cause of the so-called ‘skills shortages’. Companies that don’t invent and manufacture can’t look ahead as to how they wish to develop and to employ people for the long term. Government-funded apprenticeships would seem to offer little advantage if there is no UK industry out there to employ partially skilled youngsters waiting to step into real productive work activities. Replacement windows and doors, cardboard packaging, painting and decorating can find more focussed and careful practitioners among the lower paid migrant workers.
The InstMC must not fall victim to an inevitable trap of selecting people merely because they represent a ‘minority group’ in order to improve artificial ‘head-count’ statistics. There must be a multitude of reasons why Engineering still sees a considerable shortage of women among the ranks – felt especially by professional institute memberships. In modern engineering activities, involving more office-based theoretical work, there should be an even greater natural place for the meticulous eye and attention to detail that women tend to be good at. Companies have and uphold very visible policies to support ‘diversity’ and to report and deal with problems such as sexual harassment and racism in the workplace. The modern UK workplace should therefore be a very happy place for women especially as working hours can now be fairly flexible. The downside is that companies actually tend to be far too controlling of their workforces through the insistence on adherence to their global policies. I believe that women, in particular, have more of a desire to prove themselves and therefore wish to maintain more control over decision-making and what they do. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, of course, among any group of workers. In engineering, proven practices and precise standards are followed – not whimsical, ‘master-strokes of genius’, especially where safety engineering may be at stake.
The above Spoils the Outlook for the IoE and the IoT in the United Kingdom
The Industrial Ethernet magazine has recently published some quite helpful articles on these envisaged technology areas:
The Internet of Everything being Smart Cities – big investment in electronic infrastructure required;
The Internet of Things or Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Industry 4.0 being a future focus for self-managing automated production lines – useful for mass-production manufacturing industries where automation is already in place or evolving for greater economy and efficiency. Easy to see how countries like the United States, Japan, Germany and China could benefit from IoT/M2M.
Articles of this nature are being forwarded to the Standards Policy Panel (SPP) Chairman as potential scope for future focus on engineering standards especially in view of the InstMC’s interest in these technology areas. A hardware accessory product has even been developed jointly by Belden and Weidmueller.
I have personal doubts as to how the United Kingdom can gain any real advantage in these new technologies. We are merely followers of what the technologically advanced countries of the world move forward rapidly to develop for their own ‘world domination’ in technology areas. It is the fact that the United Kingdom is nothing more than a ‘follower’ nation that indicates that we no longer require leading engineers. A country like Germany appears to have a complete technological vision of the future for its society and thus works on research and development of ideas to diversify and improve manufacturing and automation, within Europe, despite the challenges posed by countries like Japan and China. The United Kingdom hasn’t yet been highlighted among the likely IoT players.
The above all said, if the United Kingdom can attract sufficient numbers of the most highly skilled foreigners who have the necessary advanced technology skills, and set them up in prestigious business, then perhaps we can begin to compete with the world’s leading technology nations. Alas, in recent years, I have only witnessed technically qualified foreigners wishing to gain UK-based engineering jobs with the hope of then being able to bring their families over to settle in the United Kingdom, on UK-level wages – financial ambition. Unfortunately, the UK engineering employment scene is naturally highly unstable due to the lack of real manufacturing activity engaged in by worldwide companies who have no indigenous passion for the United Kingdom.
Yours sincerely
Peter Norman IEng, MInstMC