Case study

Reengineering engineering – what it looks like, how we teach it and who gets to do it.

Picture an engineer. Do you see a man in an oily boiler suit wearing a hardhat or a young woman with a headscarf using a laptop? Did they spend years studying for a degree in technologies they still use a decade later? Are they regularly updating their understanding across multiple domains in a constant effort to stay current?

If the UK’s industrial strategy is to be successful, we need to address these questions and deliver a fundamental reengineering of engineering itself – how it's perceived, how we teach it and who gets to do it. 

That was the headline from Future Skills: Engineering Solutions, the first in a new livestream series from FE News and City & Guilds. The series convenes experts from industry, education and beyond to unpack the skills challenges experienced by sectors critical to the UK's economic success. 

The engineering sector requires a focus on fundamental skills

This engineering focused livestream began with FE News CEO, Gavin O’Meara, and Bryony Kingsland, Head of Funding and Policy Insight at City & Guilds, setting the scene before handing over to a panel of experts who brought optimism, insight and practical ideas.

According to Bryony Kingsland, evidence suggests that education pathways need a reset. City & Guilds’ recent report Making Skills Work: The Path to Solving the Productivity Crisis found that fewer than half of working-age adults feel they left education with the right skills for their careers, or that they have the skills they need now and for the future. 91% of CEOs surveyed said building workforce skills is “crucial for boosting productivity.” 

The good news? There are people considering this challenge. 

In the experience of Becky Ridler, an engineer, mentor and founder of Not Just Girls, the skills gap has been exacerbated by the impact of the pandemic, “A lot of students I deal with on a daily basis, they struggle making eye contact. They don’t want to have their cameras on. They don’t know how to write basic communications. The basic skills in engineering – communication, presentation, project management – we take for granted. If kids can’t do that at a fundamental level, they’re never going to be able to complete the qualifications needed to upskill in the first place.”

And when it comes to upskilling, Rhys Morgan, Engineering Director at the Royal Academy of Engineering, was clear on what’s needed. As new technologies develop at a faster rate it is fundamental basic skills that drive success. While policy makers enjoy buzzwords such as AI and Industry 5.0, future skills are about what lies behind the buzz. “When you really start to get under the skin of quantum computing, you need thermal control engineers, vibration isolation engineers,” said Morgan, “People look at the big shiny bit at the top, actually, it’s all underpinned by fairly standard high-quality technical skills. And we’re just not creating enough of those.”

So the skills challenge is twofold: a lack of technical relevance on one hand and a deficit in ‘durable’ or ‘transferable’ skills on the other. Ridler is pleased that City & Guilds has been trying to address this by holding an “employer summit about durable skills and how important they are and how we're going to embed them in the future workforce.” What can be done to improve the skills mix?

Careers advice, classroom and career – industry has a part to play

Equipping students to explore engineering and thrive within the sector is a challenge that needs to be met in the classroom, through knowledgeable careers advice and with the help of industry. 

The panel agreed that careers advisors tend to push traditional ideas of engineering as being hands on, dirty and mechanical while education about the wider opportunities within engineering is not embedded in the classroom experience. 

The Royal Academy of Engineering’s research suggests that teachers, already overwhelmed by a large curriculum, lack the knowledge to provide accurate and up-to-date information with topics relevant to engineering being scattered between different subjects. “It kind of sits in a bit of science, a bit of computing and a bit of D&T [Design and Technology] but I think there's just a real lack of understanding among teachers about what engineering is.” This is a challenge because if teachers don’t have a clear picture of what modern engineering looks like they are less able to discuss it in inspiring and engaging ways. “It's not always wearing a boiler suit, being covered in oil. It can be digital. It can be project management,” said Morgan. Ridler agreed, “They’re pushing the typical route that engineering is hands-on, mechanical. They’re not talking about the sub-levels that go into engineering.”

The careers pipeline needs an overhaul and there appears to be an obvious fix: more involvement from employers. Employers understand the skills they need far better than teachers do and while these employers may bemoan the lack of skills there is an opportunity for them to form part of the solution – by supporting our already overwhelmed teachers. “We can only rely on teachers to teach the curriculum, whereas employers have the knowledge, have the resources, have the materials to go and teach it,” said Ridler. “The curriculum needs to allow space for employers to interact with students.”

Modular and agile qualifications will help to address skills gaps

As students and learners advance, whether in classrooms, apprenticeships or later employment, flexibility in how we design and deploy qualifications will help to address the sector’s skills gaps. Right now, the qualifications we are developing take so long to design and study that the technology being taught may already be out of date when learners join the workforce – which is a risk when technology is moving so quickly.  

Organisations need to adapt and change qualifications to fit the emergence of new technologies. The qualification system and regulators need to be flexible enough to enable agility. In Morgan’s view, “Micro-qualifications should be developed within a few months. They might only last 18 months, two years, because the technology will have moved on.” The industry needs rapid, up-to-date and accessible training that addresses immediate and future challenges. “Apprenticeships should be long duration,” he said, “They don’t fit that kind of modular approach. So let’s not try and fit everything into apprenticeships.” We need to embrace ‘micro-credentials’.

This agility isn’t just about new learners, it’s about the whole workforce, as Ridler can attest, “I did a digital and technical apprenticeship to get my degree. Four years later, the skills I was being taught that were new and edgy were the basic, mundane day-to-day running.” If micro-credentials had existed at the time, she said, she’d have been better equipped to evolve with the industry. 

These initiatives don’t need to be formal qualifications, just “short, sharp learning programmes” that allow those with knowledge of the engineering fundamentals to add new skills quickly. “There’s a real need for the current workforce to upskill on a regular basis and the best, probably most cost-effective way of doing that is with small bolt-on modular type qualifications.”

Diversity, inclusion and the culture of work

As well as relevant up-to-date skills, employers also need a stable workforce and, as Kingsland observed, the current engineering workforce is aging – many will retire within the next 10 years.

Filling this gap will mean encouraging more young people into engineering but the sector has a perception problem, especially among young women and those from minority groups. “Just 16% of the UK’s STEM workforce is made up of women and yet we have a shortage of engineers in the country,” said Kingsland.

Ridler, who acts as a mentor, agreed, “You can’t be what you can’t see. Whenever [students] go to careers fairs or work experience, they don’t see themselves in those roles. It's a white man attending because that's what the stereotype is in engineering. So, you have these young girls or people with protected characteristics not seeing themselves in the role. They just assume that people like them have tried but failed. And that's a really negative thing.”

The Royal Academy of Engineering also recognises this crisis of representation. Of those making GCSE choices at 14, Morgan told the panel, “Just 15,000 girls chose computer science GCSE last year – out of 300,000. So that's just 5% of girls doing one of the subjects that leads to engineering. Just 9,000 girls took A-Level physics. That's 3% of the entire female cohort. So there are some really fundamental issues that we need to address down in the school system and it probably goes all the way back to primary school.”

The representation problem is not something that schools and colleges can address alone because it doesn’t stop once people are working. Across all sectors, from engineering to construction there is, “A greater attrition of women,” highlighted Morgan, “Whether that’s because they’re not coming back after career breaks or they’re just leaving because they don’t like the culture.” So the solution isn’t simply getting more girls into engineering – it’s creating a sector that gives them a reason to stay.

That’s where collaboration comes in. Collaboration between providers and employers. Collaboration between sectors. And collaboration across the entire educational journey. 

Collaboration is key

The panel agreed that solutions will be found in the space where optimism meets honesty and collaboration. “We need government to recognise the role of the FE sector in the skills landscape and properly invest in it,” Morgan urged. “There’s no good just saying we’ve got this industrial strategy over here and not doing anything about a skills strategy.” We need deeper partnerships – employers in classrooms, colleges co-designing with industry, and everyone moving faster and more inclusively. “That dovetailing of employers and providers working much more closely together, that’s the way we’re going to address the teaching skills gap in FE,” Morgan said. 

Ridler agrees, we should be addressing the skills gap and cultural perceptions as early as possible. “At the moment it seems very much education is from four to 18 years old and then employers take over at that point. If employers had a better say in what happened in the early years we wouldn’t have these skill gaps in the first place.”

Skills for life

The livestream closed on a high note: visions of an agile, inclusive, modular learning ecosystem – one where micro-qualifications are normal, employers are in classrooms and engineering is no longer the dusty domain of white men in hi-vis. But the message was clear.

The engineering sector isn’t broken – but the way we train for it might be. If we want to build the future, we need to stop thinking in five-year cycles and start designing for tomorrow, today. As O’Meara noted, Singapore is already building its productivity strategy around micro-credentials and modular learning. The UK can do the same.

City & Guilds, alongside sector leaders and educators, are showing us what that might look like: faster qualifications, better guidance, stronger partnerships, inclusive practices and a clear strategy that treats skills as the cornerstone of growth.

From AI to apprenticeships, from bolt-on training to building bridges, it’s time to think big – and move fast. Because the future of engineering is already here and it’s clear we can be better prepared.