60 second interview: Ian Colvill

How did you get into engineering? It's all I've ever wanted to do since I was a kid at school basically. There was a family connection in that my dad had an engineering shop, so it really just felt like the natural thing to do. So I began work as a trainee pretty much as soon as I left school. How did you find yourself in your current position? If I'm honest, I sort of fell into it. I had lost a job previously and was running a business doing duct fitting at the time and a temporary position as an R&D technician opened up here. I came here to do that and here I still am, ten years later. What does your current role involve? Prototyping, basically. For the industrial, automotive and aerospace sectors – anything that needs a sensor. What have been the most interesting projects you have worked on? Probably some of the aerospace ones, if I'm honest, but I can't really talk about the most interesting ones as they were for the military. How has the industry changed since you first started? Well, the fact that everything comes down to the bottom line isn't exactly a change, but it does seem to have become more dominant. But beyond that, I'd probably say that the biggest change is that there don't seem to be as many people wanting to do this type of job as there used to be. There doesn't seem to be the desire to get their hands dirty anymore. Of course, computers have played a big part in that and they have made a huge difference to the way we work. I learned the old-fashioned way with a pencil and a piece of paper, but now CAD has just swept all that away and made things so much easier. I actually taught myself how to use SolidWorks years ago and it's revolutionised everything. There are no drawing offices anymore, just seats of CAD. While I do think CAD has been a positive thing generally, I do believe that having the old-fashioned skills of technical drawing is still a useful thing. After all, you never know when there might be a 'brownout'! What do you think is the biggest issue facing industry? Getting young people interested in engineering. The teaching at school now where they do design and technology, but they don't teach engineering anymore. I find that highly disturbing, really. And there are fewer and fewer kids interested in it now. Where we had Meccano and Mamod Steam Engines, now they have computers. You ask a child now what a Mamod Steam Engine looks like and they wouldn't have a clue. It's about finding the right way to excite their interest these days and I think computers have taken a lot of that away. Even though I'm a bit of a computer geek myself now, I can see the damage that they might be doing in terms of future engineers. That's definitely one of the big problems going forward. I don't deal with recruitment here and I don't think we recruit anyone under degree grade anyway, but I can see that it's a big problem and I believe that in the future we'll pay the price for it. What still excites you about engineering? Just about everything. Everything that excited me about it when I was a kid still excites me now. It's all about being hands-on. All the machining, the designing – it's all about the challenge. And the thing I find is that, the more technology advances, the greater my desire to try and find the simpler route. Rather than going the high-tech route, I want to go the other way. Everyone wants to go high-tech this high tech that, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to go back to low-tech.