Memorandum 54
Submission from Professor John Monk, Open
University
1. SUBMISSION
ON ENGINEERING
1.1 Executive Summary
1.1.1 Broadly engineers are employed to
ensure things that are constructed behave reliably and safely
as specified and engineers' efforts primarily help to bring about
change.
1.1.2 Engineered change affects a wide range
of people and the environment in which change takes place. The
requirement to evaluate the effects of proposed change brings
an ethical dimension to the profession.
1.1.3 Engineers are employed in practically
every kind of organisation that employs or produces things. Developments
in Information and Communication Technology mean that most organisations
require engineering capabilities.
1.1.4 ICT has substantially widened the
scope of engineering and contributed to the expanding scale of
engineered systems.
1.1.5 There is a public lack of awareness
of the work of engineers.
1.1.6 The falling popularity of the profession
will have an effect on the strategic reserve in UK engineering.
1.1.7 The government has a significant role
in encouraging engineering competence within UK enterprises.
1.1.8 Standardisation is important to the
successful development of engineered systems.
1.1.9 There is a mixed economy in the formation
of engineers in the UK with Universities providing good theoretical
foundation, companies providing initial professional development
and professional institutions providing quality assurance.
1.1.10 The techniques of science and mathematics
contribute to engineering judgements.
1.2 Contact
John Monk, BSc(Eng), PhD, CEng, FIET, FBCS,
MinstMC
Professor of Electronics (Digital Systems)
Department of Communication and Systems
Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
j.monk@open.ac.uk
Tel: 01908 653797
1.3 Qualifications
1.3.1 I have been Professor of Electronics
at the Open University for 25 years. The students of the undergraduate
and postgraduate courses I have been associated with are largely
employed in the engineering industry.
1.3.2 I have had close contact with industry
through lecturing, employment, secondments and research.
1.3.3 I am involved in the activities of
the Engineering and Technology Board, the UK Engineering Council,
Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society and
particularly the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
I have some international experience of educational systems and
technology companies.
1.3.4 I advise on and inspect industrial
training and education systems, look at schemes in the armed services,
and have interviewed, moderated and acted as registrar for hundreds
of candidates applying for registration as engineers. I have been
involved in decisions relating to the qualifications of thousands
of engineers. I am the registrar for all applications for registration
through the IET for Chinese applicants.
1.3.5 I have not systematically researched
UK engineering industry so my comments are opinions derived from
private meetings rather than the result of targeted enquiries.
2. THE ROLE
OF ENGINEERING
AND ENGINEERS
IN UK SOCIETY
2.1 What is engineering?
2.1.1 Engineering is about material change.
Engineers play a part in designing new things, maintaining and
operating things; they diagnose faults and failures with a view
to rectifying the fault and they play a part in regulating infrastructures
such as electricity and communications and that too involves proposing
adjustments.
2.1.2 Change brings benefits but can also
cause harm and introduce costs. An engineer's task is to propose
change and to evaluate it. This evaluation can be wide ranging
and consider energy use, material use and disposal, visual impact,
the potential users and their foibles, reliability, cost, safety,
impact on health as well as the technical capabilities of the
construction, configuration or modification. Additionally engineers
must ensure their proposals satisfy regulations, laws, industrial
(and military) standards and the constraints of, for example,
company policy and public expectations.
2.1.3 Broadly engineers are employed to
ensure things that are constructed behave as specified reliably
and safely. Often this requires a great deal of forethought.
2.2 Professionals
2.2.1 Engineers are commonly part of a larger
enterprise and while they have influence over change they are
rarely the only agents involved. The engineers, like other professionals,
advise, persuade and explain and therefore spend time in meetings.
Where they have the authority to act they must be prepared to
give convincing accounts of their actions. In any case, they have
to be persuasive and confident about their proposals, and that
is why they will spend most of their time analysing, simulating,
calculating, experimenting, prototyping and having discussions
with their engineering peers to gain assurance about their recommendations
and to develop some fluency in expressing them.
2.2.2 You would hope that in assembling
their case the engineers would be sure of their data and would
not misrepresent it to further their own personal interests and
instil trust. There is therefore an ethical dimension to the engineer's
work.
2.2.3 To secure their proposals engineers
employ logical argument, mathematical descriptions and the techniques
of science. However, rarely if ever can the different secured
parts of any case be unassailably linked or be fully consistent.
A distinction between the engineer and the scientist is, therefore,
that the engineer does not seek all-encompassing theories. For
the engineer, experience in their specialist field and a formal
or informal assessment of risks together with overarching ethical
precepts contribute to what must ultimately be judgements about
the shape of an argument and hence the shape of the engineered
artefact.
2.2.4 Similarly products, processes or constructions
are often over-specified so outlining compromises and justifying
them is also a part of the engineer's task.
2.2.5 These aspects of engineering are not
science or mathematics; the engineer does not set out to make
discoveries but to make reliable predictions and robust evidentially
based arguments to support the potential choices.
2.2.6 However engineers primarily consider
changes that are to take place in the future. Inevitably that
is fictional and requires some skill in telling the technical
story about the engineering proposal and its potential effects
often to a lay audience.
2.2.7 Engineers can also be a major influence
on the abandonment of an unsound project.
2.2.8 Thus at heart engineers task is to
make reliable judgements and convey those judgements to others
in the enterprise.
2.3 A broad profession
2.3.1 Engineers are employed in manufacturing
and increasingly in the service sector as the capabilities of
ICT expand. They are key figures of the health and military and
even, for example, in the custodial services as those services
turn to technology to improve efficiency, reduce risk and extend
their range.
2.3.2. The Engineering Council's register
gives an indication of the breadth of the engineering profession
in terms of the kinds of roles individuals perform.
2.3.3 The structure of the profession and
indeed the use of the word "engineer" is broad. They
have deep and long-standing cultural roots which make changes
in the structure of the profession and the public perception of
the profession difficult and slow.
2.4 Hidden work
2.4.1 The results of work undertaken by
engineers is largely hidden, their work is frequently completed
before something is used and the concepts that engineered products
exploit are commonly invisible physical effects such as force,
voltage or heat flow. Finally many ingenious features of products
employing, for example, information technologies or bio-engineering
are microscopic.
2.4.2 Overall it is difficult to describe
the contribution of the profession because of the variety of apparently
unconnected applications of engineering and because engineering
deals in things that for reasons of scale, safety, security, aesthetics
or insulation from disturbances are mostly hidden from the lay
observer.
2.5 More than making
2.5.1 Artefacts are not only used, they
must be made, maintained and ultimately discarded. At each stage
questions of harm and reward can arise: harm or reward to the
workforce, harm or benefit to the environment, harm and benefit
to the users or the harm and benefit to the sponsoring organisation.
2.5.2 Identifying the significant parties
affected by an engineering decision can be a tricky task. Many
engineers work for a firm. And the firm may work for clients or
investors. The users of what is to be produced may be remote in
distance and in time and may not be identifiable. And then there
are the future unknown passers by. So deciding where the benefits
and costs are going to accrue and hence what are the significant
criteria for a good outcome itself demands judgement.
2.6 Changes
2.6.1 Standardisation of engineering components
has been crucial to the development of sophisticated, cheaper
and more efficient engineered artefacts. The aim in standardisation
is to encourage the development, manufacture and use of components
and processes that behave according to tight, well-known specifications.
2.6.2 Standardisation, especially open standardisation,
renders components made by one supplier interchangeable with components
made by another. Standardisation therefore removes barriers to
competition, which encourages rapid development and improvement
of components. For instance, the standardisation of nuts and bolts
helped the mechanical industries develop, standardised windows
reduced the cost of buildings and the standardisation of communication
protocols made the global internet feasible.
2.6.3 With standards in place some engineers
concentrate on making components to the demanded standard while
other engineers accept the standards, worry less about how the
components work and concentrate on creating configurations of
standardised components to fulfil functions that build upon the
capabilities of the standardised elements to a higher level of
sophistication.
2.6.4 This increased sophistication and
emphasis on configurations makes the task of assessing the performance
and behaviour of the engineered artefact one of analysing configurations
and their properties. And this has led to a need for a cadre of
"system" engineers.
2.6.5 A system is a collection of components
connected together in particular ways. Sometimes the connections
are mechanical, hydraulic and sometimes manual but with the developments
in communication technology more and more connections are electronic
or optical. The consequent ease of connection and its standardisation
has massively encouraged the growth in scale of systems. The techniques
for the analysis of such systems are in their infancy and it requires
substantial effort to engineer these systems reliably.
2.6.6 It is noticeable that many activities
that in the past have relied on simple manual systems have become
regulated and operated by systems built around information networks.
2.6.7 It is also noticeable that business
consultancies now have major divisions concerned with system integration
employing Chartered Engineers.
3. THE ROLE
OF ENGINEERING
AND ENGINEERS
IN UK'S
INNOVATION DRIVE
3.1 Innovation is a crucial part of the engineer's
role
3.1.1 The engineer deals with specific situations
and not generalities and thus every action is set in a novel situation.
Across the spectrum of engineers there will be those that deploy
well-established techniques to familiar types of installations
but ultimately to deal with unanticipated events and there will
be those who create and promote radically new engineering opportunities.
In all cases there is an element of novelty that can bring about
anything from minor adjustments to radical prospects for societal
change.
3.1.2 Discoveries of social, chemical or
physical phenomenon are often have no clear connection with a
potential use. Engineers seeking improvements or novel approaches
who are aware of a broad spectrum of discoveries will find uses
for the discovery and will evaluate the utility and ultimately
propose the integration of the discovery in some application.
Equally an engineer may reject the use of a discovery because
of uncertainties surrounding it; this assessment of feasibility
must be carried out by those who are familiar with the constraints
of engineering including the constraints of the market.
3.1.3 The engineer through his or her professional
network is likely to be aware of new devices and materials. Indeed
his or her business may be to find applications for new devices
and materials. And having recognised a promising opportunity the
engineer has to persuade others of the benefits by identifying
problems or needs that will be resolved by the new opportunity.
In this situation the engineer has a broad responsibility to use
his or her authority to propose changes that are broadly worthwhile.
3.1.4 Innovations feed one another. A minor
change to a production process may bring about sufficient change
in the properties of an engineered component that that altered
component is taken up in another engineered product or process
and brings rewards.
3.1.5 Innovation is rarely radical but the
cumulative effect of thousands of tiny changes in products or
processes can transform an industry.
4. THE STATE
OF THE
ENGINEERING SKILLS
BASE IN
THE UK
4.1 The supply of engineers
4.1.1 The relative reduction of applicants
for studies in engineering (both amongst young people and older
people seeking new qualifications) will inevitably affect the
supply of engineering staff.
4.1.2 This may not result in a shortage
since the UK has been able to attract well-qualified immigrants.
4.1.3 However many engineering enterprises
have international organisations and may find it simpler to move
their engineering operations to other countries where there is
an engineering labour pool.
4.1.3 The drop in interest in engineering
studies is a global phenomenon and there are no clear indications
as to why there is a slackening interest.
4.1.4 An alternative has been to welcome
investors from outside the UK to run UK based operations and thus
gain engineering support from engineering resourcesin other parts
of the globe.
4.1.5 But there is a strategic issue. Localised
engineering talent is essential for some industries and government
departments.
4.1.6 In times of protracted international
dispute, engineers are required to reconfigure infrastructures
of all kinds to cope with shortages, damage, disruption to logistics
and the extension and repair of defensive capabilities.
4.1.7 Bearing in mind it takes around seven
years to train the highest cadre of engineers, therefore having
an engineering reserve is a wise precaution.
4.2 Issues of diversity (for example, gender
and age profile)
4.2.1 There are strong cultural factors
that lead to different groups being represented in the engineering
profession. My comments are not based on any structured study
but it is clear that women are not well-represented in the profession
and there are ethnic biases but I do not have specific data.
4.2.2 The age profile varies amongst employers
of engineers. The profile is commonly linked to company and organisational
histories and the broad evolution within specific industries.
5. THE IMPORTANCE
OF ENGINEERING
TO R&D AND
THE CONTRIBUTION
OF R&D TO
ENGINEERING
5.1 Engineering
5.1.1 It is impossible to separate engineering
activities from research and development. Development is an engineering
activity that takes a concept, material, phenomenon or process,
finds uses for it and makes it useful.
5.1.2 Some development will be centred on
engineering activity itself. For example, the improvement of software
based tools or the refinement of measuring equipment.
5.1.3 Research into markets and market expectations
can guide the engineering task.
5.2 Science
5.2.1 Scientific research that uncovers
new phenomena or new forms of material can provide inspiration
for new forms of engineered product or process.
5.2.2 The instruments, materials, simulations,
software tools and apparatus of science are heavily engineered.
However scientific apparatus is operated by specialists in protected
surroundings often for a limited time and does not necessarily
demand the highest level of engineering. However in some instance
very high degrees of precision, only obtainable with careful engineering,
are required.
6. THE ROLES
OF INDUSTRY,
UNIVERSITIES, PROFESSIONAL
BODIES, GOVERNMENT
UNIONS AND
OTHERS
6.1 Education and training
6.1.1 Universities primarily provide a traditional
base of theory with a taste of other facets of engineering such
as ethics, project and financial management. With a focus on the
individual student they can only approximate the collective learning
provided by working on an industrial project. Universities rarely
have realistic engineering tasks to perform that illustrate the
essential core of engineering work.
6.1.2 Many large companies have excellent
training schemes for engineering graduates.
6.1.3 A change in the Engineering Council's
policy demanded higher levels of qualification for registration.
This has posed a problem for some companies who cannot recruit
sufficient people with higher levels of qualification. As a result
some companies, often in partnership with Universities, develop
educational programmes for their newly recruited graduates.
6.1.4 Companies in the ICT sector recruit
non-engineering graduates as well as engineering graduates. The
rate of change of the product base in this sector means that everyone
has to learn continuously. Often these companies are generous
with the opportunities for learning they provide for their employees.
6.1.5 There is a growing number of private
companies who have found a number of profitable niches to provide
some of the education previously provided by universities.
6.1.6 Manufacturers of equipment provide
courses to brief people on their, often very sophisticated, products.
Certification of achievements on these courses has become a valued
commodity for graduates and employers.
6.1.7 The professional engineering institutions
accredit engineering degrees, and industrial training and education
programmes. This accreditation is taken seriously by companies
and Universities and thus helps to ensure a high standard of education
and training for professional engineers. Accreditation is not
universal but nevertheless sets exposes the high standards expected
of all providers.
6.1.8 The professional institutions also
have rigorous processes for the assessment of individual engineers
and thus set standards of practice. This is of value to individuals,
but also can help a company illustrate its competence through
the proportion of registered engineers it employs.
6.1.9 The engineering institutions through
a wide variety of means provide opportunities for engineers to
stay in touch with the state of the art and to share experience.
7. GOVERNMENT
ACTIONS
7.1.1 All countries are vulnerable to losses
of competent engineers to other countries. Any government has
to be aware of potential drains and the consequent attrition of
every aspect of infrastructure. And develop the capability to
monitor and respond to critical losses of engineering skills.
7.1.2 The development of open standards
for engineered devices should be facilitated by government, and
government should make sure the standards are adopted by UK industry.
This requires good mechanisms for the dissemination of standards.
7.1.3 Government could ensure that the engineers
and the staff of its contractors it employs meet the standards
demanded by the UK Engineering Council.
7.1.4 Government should, through the education
system, encourage people into engineering careers that provide
routes to competence standards.
7.1.5 Government should seek to provide
better coverage for SMEs of the work of the professional bodies
in sharing of engineering knowledge, understanding and practice.
March 2008
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