Engineering graduates for industry - Royal Academy of Engineering

Engineering graduates for industry
but the overall number and quality should be raised’ and in an earlier report 24 stated that larger firms continue to look
far and wide to recruit STEM talent to help them to position themselves for new market opportunities, as well as
counteracting skills shortages in the UK labour market.
Small to medium-sized enterprises
The voices of major graduate recruitment companies can dominate the discussions of ‘what industry needs’, and the
ongoing needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are less well understood. Small firms (10-50 employees)
employ more than 58% of the private sector workforce, but only 15% of their employees are degree level educated,
compared to over 30% in the biggest companies. Research from the Federation for Small Businesses states that more
than 20% of small firms would take on a graduate, yet nearly half are unaware that they can run internship schemes 25 .
EE21C found little difference between the requirements for graduate engineering skills of major companies and SMEs.
However, as SMEs prefer to take on graduates with some experience of the commercial world, they often prefer to
employ graduates that have gone through the training schemes of larger companies. Nevertheless, these training
schemes are becoming fewer in number and smaller in size than they used to be, therefore SMEs may look increasingly
to universities to supplement their courses with industry-based experience.
Large employers
Some large employers warn against universities being too elaborate in what they teach and do not want universities
to overload degrees with non-technical content at the expense of mathematics and engineering science. Whilst
acknowledging that softer skills are important to career success, they have the resources to teach them as required on
the job and believe the hard maths and engineering science are best suited to the university environment.
Employability skills
The attributes that industry is looking for in graduates from engineering degree programmes have been debated across
the world, with tension between the need to educate students as specialists whilst developing them as generalists.
Accounts of historical changes in engineering education describe the swinging pendulum over the decades between
theoretical knowledge and practical skills 26 .
In an attempt to achieve a balance, the
Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate
(CDIO) initiative 27 has a requirement that “the
education emphasises the technical
fundamentals, while strengthening the
learning of personal and interpersonal skills;
and product, process, and system building
skills.”
The overall importance of generic
employability skills (or ‘soft’ skills) is widely
reported in the literature. Definitions of
employability skills can vary between
employers and universities but the CBI
definition is: “A set of attributes, skills and
knowledge that all labour market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the
workplace – to the benefit of themselves, their employer and the wider economy.” These attributes include self-management,
teamworking, business and customer awareness, problem solving, communication and literacy, application of numeracy
and information technology, all of which are underpinned by a positive attitude.
The CIHE 28 reports that 86% of employers consider good communication skills and teamworking to be important and
many are not satisfied that graduates can express themselves effectively. The largest gaps between importance to
24
CBI/UUK (2009) Future Fit: Preparing graduates for the world of work
25
FSB (2008) Small Businesses in the UK: New Perspectives on Evidence and Policy
26
Jorgensen in Rethinking Engineering Education Crawley et al, Springer (2007)
27
The CDIO initiative is an innovative educational framework for producing the next generation of engineers,
www.cdio.org.uk
28
CIHE (2008) Graduate Employability: What do employers think and want?
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