Engineering community slams report for questioning skills shortage
A report issued last week by Professor Emma Smith and Stephen Gorard of the University of Birmingham has sparked debate amongst the engineering community for suggesting that there is no longer a skills shortage in the UK.
The report, entitled Is there a shortage of scientists?, suggests that less than half of 2009 engineering graduates were in jobs directly related to their degree subject six months after leaving university. In addition, it claims that nearly a quarter of all UK engineering graduates are working in non graduate jobs or unskilled work such as waiting and shop work.
The report says: "Perhaps, because of recent initiatives, there seem to be too many people studying science for the labour market to cope with, or perhaps graduates are no longer of sufficient quality.
"It is more likely, however, that all of these scientists are without relevant employment every year because the shortage thesis is wrong and there are no jobs waiting for all of them or because they are 'dropping out' having learnt that they do not enjoy their subject areas."
Speaking on behalf of the Education for Engineering policy group, Philip Greenish, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: "Engineers are highly skilled professionals. Employers recruit them from wherever they can in a global marketplace. Only a proportion will be fresh UK graduates. To infer that employers don't know their own workforce needs when they identify a shortage of engineers, and to do this based on data that only considers a subset of recruits is just plain wrong."
Paul Jackson, chief executive of EngineeringUK (pictured), added: "The situation is a lot more nuanced than Smith and Gorard suggest. Skills shortages do exist in particular areas, notably in power engineering, petrochemicals, systems engineering and advanced manufacturing.
"Talented students who have the potential to be our future graduate engineers must not be put off by the headline grabbing statistics taken from this research, rather than looking at the detail of the situation. The key message from this research is the challenge to the engineering community to ensure that our degree programmes continue to meet the future needs of industry."
The full report can be downloaded below.
