The engineering skills gap seems to be ever widening. To meet the industry’s recruitment demands, 90,000 new engineers a year will be needed, according to a recent report by the trade union Unite. While many, including Unite, are calling on government to do more to encourage young talent into the profession, it is proactive schemes such as Year in Industry (YINI) that are getting them through the door.
Run by charitable organisation EDT, the scheme provides school-leavers and university undergraduates with paid work placements at engineering firms around the country. It aims not only to provide students with valuable work experience but also to inspire them to pursue careers in the industry.
Set up 28 years ago by Bristol-based teacher Audrey Clayton, the scheme began as a small-scale operation to find placements for students with local businesses that were concerned about new employees’ lack of practical experience. Today, EDT places students with 300 of the top UK companies every year – including Shell, Rolls-Royce, EDF, Network Rail and GKN – as well as with a range of smaller firms.
Chris Ward, South West regional director at EDT, says that while many firms still prefer to target students for placements themselves directly with universities, there are many benefits to joining the YINI scheme, which averages 2,000 student applications a year. “Often what tend to be the higher academic students, studying at Cambridge, Imperial, Durham, aren’t offered the chance to do a gap year in their degree and so you can’t approach them at the university. If you want them as a potential early recruit, you have a better chance of reaching them before they attend university through our scheme,” he says.
“We are also not affiliated to just one university – we are independent and national, so we have a large pool of proactive students to choose from,” he adds.
In its most basic form, EDT works like a recruitment agency, gathering applications and CVs from students, coaching them for interviews, and then matching them to roles offered by firms signed up to the scheme. Students will then go through a formal interview process with the firm and, if successful, will be offered a 12-month paid position.
However, EDT’s services do not end there. All successful candidates are then provided with an induction to prepare them for their first taste of full-time work. The organisation outlines the codes of behaviour that companies will expect,
and how to present themselves in a professional manner. “We tell them it is not school; they won’t be spoon-fed. There will be no ‘tick this box, pass that’ – companies don’t work that way. We explain they have to go looking for work and be proactive, set their own deadlines, and so on,” says Ward.
This induction is then backed up with a mentor, who provides support and guidance to both the firm and the student throughout the placement year. While firms may expect the students to depend heavily on the mentor or need a lot of guidance, they are soon surprised at their ability to learn and take on complex projects, he says.
Rapid progress: Orwin's Dave Maughan with Jack Patterson
This is true of Jack Patterson, who spent his year in industry at Orwin, one of the biggest automation and special-purpose machine builders in the UK. A mechanical engineering undergraduate at the University of Sunderland, he decided to take part in the YINI scheme between the second and third year of his degree. He says his motivation was to gain real industrial work experience and give his future career some direction.“I had just had academic experience and I wasn’t sure where my degree would lead me, or if I was going to get a job in the engineering industry. I wanted reassurance that it was worth what I was doing.”
Working in a team of 100 engineers designing and manufacturing machines for major clients, Patterson was given small jobs to begin with. However Dave Maughan, mechanical design engineer at Orwin, says the team identified “fairly quickly that he was a capable lad, and gave him real work to do”.
So then Patterson assumed the responsibility, alongside a project manager, for redesigning a razor blade assembly machine for a company based in Turkey. The challenge was to produce a machine that could assemble nine separate components every five seconds for the clients’ new triple-blade razor design. The work included Patterson completely redesigning assembly stations to make the new parts, and saw him involved in each stage of the project, from design drawing to commission. “Following the success of that project, we received a second order from the same firm and I was put in charge of the mechanical design for that,” says Patterson. It also led to him winning the Contribution to Business awards that EDT holds for YINI students each year, beating nine other finalists.
Maughan adds that considering this was Orwin’s first experience of YINI, the team was pleasantly surprised at how quickly Patterson progressed in his short time there. “One of his strengths was on the design side. You only had to tell Jack something once and then he had it.”
This sentiment is echoed by Will Teale, group environmental reporting manager at Centrica, which has been involved in YINI for the past eight years. “Every year I am amazed at the calibre of students coming through the YINI scheme,” he says. “There is probably a perception that they won’t be much use beyond making coffee and photocopying, but if you get the right student that is so far from the truth.”
Often, says Teale, the young students coming in on the scheme end up providing the firm with new skills – particularly in IT and social media – and even help to pioneer projects for which the firm previously lacked capability.
This benefit is particularly true of the firm’s most recent YINI student, Zahrah Hussain. Having studied chemical engineering for three years at University College London, she applied her prior knowledge of lifecycle analysis to a Centrica windfarm. Her involvement led to a greater understanding for the firm of the carbon emissions associated with the windfarm, from material extraction all the way to building, operation and maintenance and eventual dismantling. In helping to identify carbon hotspots, Centrica can now look at the potential for improving the design or reducing those hotspots, says Teale. “It was a tricky project, and none of us knew much about how to do it. So it was pioneering from our organisation’s perspective, as we had no internal knowledge to help Zahrah.”
For Hussain, using her engineering knowledge in a real-world application was a rewarding experience, not least because it boosted her confidence. “I’d just come out of three years at university, and I didn’t think my opinions were valid,” she says. “But as I was getting towards the end of my placement, I realised people would take my opinion into account.”
Hotspot hotshot: Centrica benefited from Zahrah Hussain's prior knowledge
The carbon chain project also served to give her a deeper understanding of the subject, as well as showing her how to challenge and be more flexible with her engineering knowledge gained from academia, she adds. “There were different branches that go off from lifecycle analysis that you are not taught at university,” she says. “You go into work and think ‘this is right and this is what I was taught’, but it may not be, because there may well be a variation that will work better.”
She also opted to attend a three-day leadership course, one of many subsidised training courses that EDT runs for YINI students. Ward says these are offered to help them become more well-rounded and polished individuals than if they had gone straight through academia into the working world. Hussain says the course came in useful when leading her project at Centrica, but it also proved a good way to meet, and get support from, other young people on the YINI scheme.
The whole experience reaffirmed that engineering was the career for her, and because of her performance at Centrica she has secured a graduate job at the firm, which she will take up after completing her final year at university. Ward says this is one of the main benefits of the scheme, whereby employers can treat their time with the students as a year-long interview. “Any interview is a lottery, but why not try before you buy? Get them in for a year, see what they behave like. You then have an established relationship with them. Keep that alive through university, and it is effectively a smallish investment in a long-term plan to get a good-quality graduate employee.”
However, firms thinking about enrolling should also look to the wider recruitment benefits that the scheme can provide, says Mick Robinson, manufacturing engineering manager at Chemring, which provides expendable countermeasure technology. “When your YINI student goes on to, or back to, university they know us and will be talking about their experience and I’m sure we are part of the conversation, so effectively we have gained an ambassador,” he says.
This aspect adds value to the firms’ already ongoing links to the university, says Robinson, who aims to keep in touch with prior YINI student Ben Weeks, who is studying his first year of an engineering degree at the University of Exeter. “It is that mutual benefit of building networks for them and for us,” he says. “Some firms will see the challenges rather than the opportunities. They may see the cash fee that needs to be paid, a salary that needs to be paid, an element of training or induction to provide the student with – but the value is terrific.”
Transformative experience: Ben Weeks (left) with Dame Ann Dowling and Chris Ward
Chemring has been involved with YINI for four years, and during this time the students have all been talented, driven and always looking to be challenged, says Robinson. This doesn’t just mean taking on difficult engineering projects, but also pushing outside their comfort zones to develop softer, but just as vital, personal and professional skills. The company ensures students get experience of interfacing with, and presenting to, a wide audience, he says, dealing with emails and phone calls in a professional manner, and gaining commercial savvy by liaising with other firms or clients.
“What I’d highlight about Ben, and the other students we’ve had, is the enormous personal growth they get as a result. Ben as raw material was quite shy and naïve in these softer skills, but his personal growth throughout the year was huge, and he came out of it a different person.”
Weeks says that not only did the process increase his confidence, but it has also helped to give him more of an understanding of engineering practically, as well as theoretically. This has made a “huge difference” to how he accesses his degree, he says. “I found that I haven’t been struggling with anything yet. Even new theories that I haven’t met before, I have been able to pick up quickly just from seeing how everything is applied in the workplace.” He adds that his time at Chemring has prompted him to narrow his career options down, and he is likely to specialise in mechanical engineering
or materials.
Both students and engineering firms involved in the YINI scheme are quick to expound its benefits. However, frustratingly, there is a distinct lack of firms offering placements to the 2,000 students signing up each year, says Ward. Yet for firms worried about the skills gap, it is schemes such as this that can help to fill it with their pool of raw talent. “When time and time again companies say ‘we have a skills shortage, we aren’t producing people with the right skills’, I always say that it is irrelevant,” says Ward. “If you have people with the right attitude, you can teach them the skills. All you need are people who want and are hungry to learn, and the rest is easy.”