The problems identified by Dr Ahmed, i.e. a lack of perceived high financial rewards for scientists, engineers and technologists are real. However there is little to be done, at least in the short to medium term about those perceptions. It will take a long time for it to 'sink in' that engineering at least offers plenty of reliable and interesting jobs - globally. Because the demand side problems are not easily amenable to resolution it is important that attention be turned to the supply side. By that I mean the enrolments and standards of maths and the numerical sciences in secondary schools. Enrolments are weak, standards worse. That problem is something that governments, given the will, could rectify. The various Boards of Study now compel students to study highly diluted material and then be assessed by methods that owe little to objectivity. Education faculties churn out teachers who frequently lack essential subject knowledge and are imbued with teaching methods and school organisation systems that actively militate against high achievement. A drastic parliaments driven revolution of schooling is long overdue.

A lot of kids don’t know what an engineer does. They think they are mechanics or something similar. Engineers Australia is currently trying to fix this perception of engineers in schools. Kids are also steering clear of the sciences in school such as the higher level of maths, essential to studying engineering at university. They are taking the easier options available to them. I agree with Dr Tanveer Ahmed that TV plays a major part in influencing young people’s career options such as the half dozen law and crime shows currently shown on TV. I remember when I was at primary school coming home from school and watching a kids science program (can anybody remember the name of it?, have a look now at the rubbish been shown after school to our kids.

PS I do not wear glasses and would not be considered a geek

Its true that there is a perception inside and outside the engineering profession that engineers are not adequately paid for the work they do. Labourers with no responsibility and no education on construction sites are paid more than the young engineers.

I know several excellent engineers with bright children. When I ask the children if they are going to study engineering at University they usually reply "No, I've seen how hard my Dad works and he doesn't get paid enough." These are people who know exactly what an engineer does. I know one example where the NSW engineer of the year's son, is now an investment banker.

One reason that engineers don't share the status of doctors and lawyers is that engineers spread the knowledge around and try to make the knowledge less mysterious. Plumbers know a little hydraulics, electricians know a little power engineering, carpenters and concreters know a little structural engineering. Lots of engineering problems can be solved without an engineer. If you ask a lawyer or doctor to explain why they make some recommendation, they imply that it is just too hard for the layman to understand.

Another perception that is hard to overcome is that once you graduate in engineering you will always be "just a technical guy." Whereas a business or finance major has the world laid out in front of him. In fact, an engineering education is excellent training for a wide variety of careers, because it teaches science, technology and problem solving.

I think Dr Ahmed has written an interesting article but I wish he would offer some solutions rather than just describe the problems. We live in a capitalist society. Engineers are paid what the market will bear. It is also unlikely that we are going to see a sexy new TV show about engineers although CSI and NCIS use a lot of science in their crime solving. Even my teenage son says "Gil Grissom is cool."

Continued from above:

One of the hardest things to sell for the engineering profession is that engineering is fun. Nobody wants to believe it. I honestly think that is one of the factors that keeps engineers salaries low. Engineers love doing their jobs.

I know many engineers who have turned down higher paying, more senior jobs because "My whole job would have been management. I'd rather stay with the calculations and the nuts and bolts engineering work." I doubt if many accountants turn down promotions so that they can continue adding up balance sheets.

This also contributes to the nerd factor for engineers. The nerd always has his calculator out solving a problem or figuring something out. The reason that we always have our calculators out and are trying to solve problems is that engineering is fun and it is fun to find the answer to a problem. It feels great and you can't wait to get the next problem to solve.

One thing that I think IEAust could do to promote engineering is to do profiles of high powered engineers or people in high powered positions that have engineering training. That way you could show that engineering trainaing is good for a variety of positions not just nuts and bolts engineering.

One thing the government could do to promote engineering is ensure that engineers get the high powered civil service jobs where it is appropriate and then let it be known that the skills needed are engineering skills. The heads and boards of directors of the Roads authorities and Environment authorities in many states don't have any engineers on them. It would seem like that would be critical, but apparently it is not.

I hope we can continue to progress without much interest in engineers.

Unless you have the 'perpetual employeee' mentality, here is a strategy for Engineers.

Work for some company after you graduate, get the expience we all need for a few years, then identify 'something' you can make or improve, or invent, or do better- leave and start your own company !

After all, when the crunch comes the company which employs you will think little of downsizing the Eng dept when they need to, no matter if you have been faithfully and selflessly giving and giving of yourself for a decade.

When you have identified that 'something', zip over to Singapore, then goto the Island of Pulau Batam, just 40 minutes by Ferry, check out some VERY low cost factories with labor rates similar to China and make that 'something' and sell it to the world.

Forget Australian labor, you won't compete, at least that's what the government has been telling us.

Or... if your 'something' can be pretty much 90% assembled by automation, then you have a chance of competing, so you can employ maybe 1 or 2 people to do the associated admin and stores work, whereas in the past you might have required 20 production workers to load your circuit boards. (speaking from my own field of electronics)

As for your customer service, well that's simple, outsource that to a Malaysian call centre in Cyber Jaya, when you need to go there ..simple, jump on a plane, over to KL, then onto the Fast train enjoy the sights of Oil Palm planations for a few minutes, a little bit of Pavaroti thru the AV system and "viola"-you are there.

Yes, we need more engineers, but we also need a framework which will make them meaningful and fulfilled.

Korea and Taiwan, have similar populations to Australia, pay rates are MUCH higher than China, yet we export commodities to them for steel etc.......we don't value add.

How stupid, selfish and short sighted we are.

Do we have any engineer who can see ways to work "smarter" than Korean Ship builders, or Taiwanese chip makers ?

ooops.... I forgot one thing.....

Among the jobs which are already being outsourced to Asia

Sales
Customer Support
Back office/Clerical/Accounts
Hi volume Low cost Manufacturing
Car parts
IT/Software design

I should add 'ENGINEERING'

Its as easy as getting on a chat room, finding some bright Engineer in India or whereever, and making your deal there and then.

BRIEF
Design me a widget which will do such and such.

All communications are as fast as within Australia, by email etc...
Payments from your computer with International money transfers.... piece of cake.

But don't worry .. I can probably grow enough vegies to feed myself and maybe 20 other families on my place, so if we work together, we might survive.

I think we are not headed for a crisis, it has already arrived, we just don't see the fallout because like smoking, you don't get cancer after the first puff, but in the end it gets you.

During the 'Asian Crisis' Malaysia bucked the system and pegged it's Ringgit to the US dollar. Everyone poo-pooed them, but now they are doing fine thankyou very much.

Survival in this dog eat dog world will take creative and radical government action, some protection, some innovation, and a lot of clear thinking. I say 'government' because private enterprise has a simple way out if things don't go their way.. MOVE TO BRAZIL or somewhere.

eric,

"One thing that I think IEAust could do to promote engineering is to do profiles of high powered engineers or people in high powered positions that have engineering training. That way you could show that engineering trainaing is good for a variety of positions not just nuts and bolts engineering."

Has anybody heard of a bloke called Andy Thomas?
He’s a Mechanical Engineer probably the most famous from Australia.
Maybe the goverment could use him as a role model for kids in school.

With an engineering education you can pretty much go into any technical job. The opportunities are huge. I disagree with some of the comments made in here that engineering is a low paid job. It has one of the highest starting salaries for a university graduate with mining engineering grads starting on salaries as high as 70k.

It is common practice now in the US for engineers to do a business qualification such as an MBA or some other business degree. It is not uncommon for people with these qualifications to receive 6 figure salaries. Yes there are poorly paid engineers working for local governments but there are people in all professions who are poorly paid.

I don't think that there is a shortage of examples of engineers demonstrating their organisational skills outside of purely technical aspects.
Just for starters I might mention the engineer who was one of the three commissioners for the 1976/77 Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry (and probably asked the most relevant and probing questions of those providing evidence; and who, later, was the first head of the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority). Another, a mining engineer, was head of personnel for Comalco for some years. Engineers' training and organisational skills are relevant well beyond the borders of engineering projects.
I think it is unfortuate that Federal Governments of all recent persuasions have devolved responsibilities so much to the private sector that no longer is there a reservoir of much depth containing engineering skills within Government ranks.
That impacts on the independence and impartiality of advice available to governments. It also impacts on the professional body, deprived of government sector numbers, and now largely viewing the health of the profession more from an entrepreunarial standpoint. One where a dearth of projects is of more consequence than the social ecological health of a society caught up in a whirlwind of "development".

As an engineer for 15 odd years. One thing I have noticed is that friends who started as a graduate engineer quite a few now have gone into diverse roles outside engineering. Into merchant banking, Risk in Insurnace companies, management leaders of other industry - textile/clothing. What IEAust should sell is the fact that engineers can move into these or staying in the diversity of engineering itself. I have never heard of a person with a commerce/business background becoming an engineer but not uncommon for an engineer to move into commerce/business.

The set of skills for engineers is unique and allows this career change.

Frankly for the money IEAust gets it should do more.

AS an Aus-born engineer who 20 years ago EASILY earned the marks for entry into medicine, and now working in the automation/controls industry, let me say one thing... engineering is TOO intellectually and otherwise difficult for most people in it... meaning that even the smarter ones have to waste their careers arguing and fixing the mistakes and cowering to the bigwigs...

Savior68....come and work with me :)

are u up to speed on the self starting of encoderless brushless dc motors ? That is the next project. Will be using a DSP with existing code, just needs to be fine tuned for an application.

I don't quite see your point in relation to the topic though, and if your as smart as your post suggests, (I don't doubt it) I'm surprised you did not give a more analytical perspective on the future prospects of Aussie engineers in the light of outsourcing etc...

I would appreciate your own insights on this.

Anedotal memory. In my former life of employment by others, a 3rd yr Elec Eng student on work experience was mean't to charge up a large clamp mount capacitor for a test, he almost connected the voltage to the 'clamp tabs' rather than the +/- on the top. I think he left engineering after that.

Isn't it odd that the gate keepers of our currency make huge profits and produce nothing of practical use.Insurance companies create the need for their existence through our legal system.

Most people don't study the sciences because of the poor pay.Our brightest minds crave to become litigation lawyers.I find this some what perverted.

If we are training our brightest to take more from our economy in non productive enterprises we have to expect to be left behind in technological and scientific innovation.

Hello BOAZ_David

My post was just an (overly frank?) agreement with the writer. And no, I know little about brushless DC motors.

By the way, may I please have a serious dig at the people without engineering degrees who insist on barging into our profession and depriving our up and coming graduates of much needed experience.... and thus perpetrating one of the unstated reasons that this country faces a grave shortage of tradesmen.

I think the problem comes down to a lack of venture capital. In America, twenty-somethings who are in finance cannot wait to get out of that industry and into technology.

As a former Sydney Merchant Banking recruiter, I know this problem well. We tried to avoid graduate recruitment with its endless line of kids with no idea what the job was about. They are victims of our education system and media that delivers its biggest rewards in the form of "recognition".

Kids are constantly reminded of where they came in relation to the rest of their class etc, and this constant feeding of recognition pushes them into roles that sound schmick when mentioned at a party.

Yet, if one were to disect the job of a foreign exchange dealer it would fall somewhere between a bookies clerk and an accounts payable person. There is zero satisfaction for a gifted person in this sort of role. So they feed their recognition button with the porche, the casino and conspicuous revelry. Then they burn out.

But not from the job but, rather, from the self destructive responses to the monotony of the job. The in-house myths suggest that they move on to cooler forms of early retirement. But I now of one ex-head-of-desk who now runs a fruit shop, another has removals trucks.

Excessive recognition motivation looms as a serious long-term problem for Australia and the world. We'll get an entire corporate culture with a narcissistic personality disorder.

We have kids with double majors, a masters and an MBA in train but who lack the basic interpersonal skills to deal with issues that are more than 10% outside the daily norm. Instead of an endless quest for credentials, they should spend six months pulling beers or driving cab to learn how to deal with people.

Bundaberg's "Dr Death" had a classic recognition problem, spending much of his time "perceptually positioning" himself in the eyes of those around him. The last thing we need is people like that building bridges and tunnels.

We need to get into the classrooms (or out of them)to develop and reinforce the functional satisfaction that comes from completing a task or project. Reward them for what they do. And by their deeds shall ye know them.

In my opinion, Australia not only does not only not have enough engineers, but it lacks motivation for innovation. Australia does not do enough to encourage invention and innovation. There are the odd few spots of invention and innovation, but it is not part of the culture of the nation, of its national psyche. Engineering, invention and innovation are not given the same publicity and encouragement as sports and entertainment.
The nations of East Asia, such as Japan, South Korea and China by far surpass Australias research and development, and manufacturing capacity in the field of electronics, computing and related technologies. I have purchased a laser pointer, which was manufactured in China, for $5 at a suburban Melbourne retailer. For a look at an advanced humanoid robot produced by Honda in Japan, see
http://asimo.honda.com. I suspect that Australia lacks the research and development and manufacturing capacity to produce either a laser pointer at that price point, or a humanoid Robot.
This means that in the event of a situation where foreign technology supply is not available, the people of Australia could face harsh problems

So now our Govt wants to compete with Asia by lowering wages to attract industry and investment here.If we go the way of the US and have a pool of working poor we will also have the crime and hopelessness of not be able to afford to buy the products we produce.All people in our modern era who work should be able to live beyond a subsistance level.

Ireland went high tech and invested in education and is doing very well.I agree with Tanveer,Perseus and Knowall;we are lacking innovation and tenacity.Could it be our infatuation with Hollywood glamour,sex,drugs and rock and dole?

In every Chinese business in this country I see people on a mission of achievement.While I think we should have time for family,we sure can learn a lot from them.

Arjay - all good points you raise. It is unfeasable to lower Australia's standard of living in a spurious effort to compete with the Asian market - we need an intelligent, innovative, high tech approach such as Ireland has taken.

The best professor I ever had at uni was an engineer - we need creative flair and innovation, something the bean counters are not capable of nor interested in.

(formerly Trinity)

While we are in the topic of lack of innovative, intelligent and high-tech approaches within industries in Australia,
I did some googleing and found an Australian company that's got some interesting ideas:
http://www.slinteractive.com.au/products.php

Australia has all the resources needed to become a world leader in almost any industry.
We just need to step out of the box that we've confined ourselves in.

Question: How to get more kids into engineering?

Answer: Bring back MacGyver!