Articles
Autodesk engineer Steve Bedder
The world will always need and want new, better, cheaper, faster and greener products. With this ever-growing thirst, the requirement for designers, engineers and manufacturing is not going to go away. But what does seem to be slipping away is the ambition and desire of school pupils to become part of this industry.
As with many of you, I’ve got children, and have friends and family with kids of varying ages. But I can think of only one of them who has expressed a desire to do anything resembling a career in engineering.
I wanted to find out why this was the case. I didn’t carry out a scientific study. I just asked during conversation: “What about a career in design and engineering?” The response I got was telling. Pretty much all the children I spoke to had no real concept of what design and engineering was. But for me, what was more important was that they had no idea of the impact it had on their everyday world.
I’ve been lucky that my career with Autodesk has presented me with several opportunities to speak in front of many students, mainly those in the latter years of secondary or high school, but also college and university students. But it’s always been to those of an age who have decided on a career or education path in design engineering: they’ve made their choice. Although such occasions have always been rewarding, I felt that we need to educate those who are younger about our industry – what it is, what it does and how it affects them.
So I approached the headteacher of the primary school my eight-year-old son goes to. I explained that I would like to come and speak to some of the children about design and engineering. Nothing major and nothing complicated, just 30 minutes or so of educating the children about design, engineering and manufacturing, with a view to them seeing that design engineering offers a rewarding and interesting career.
I was expecting to speak to the older kids in the school, but the first group I talked to was about 45 younger children, from five up to seven years old – a tough crowd.
The talk itself was different from what I would normally do. I didn’t speak about Autodesk, digital prototyping, product lifecycle management and so on – if I had done so, I would have quickly been pelted with paint and Fuzzy Felt.
Instead, we talked about the objects they see and use every day and where they come from. We talked about how engineers design and manufacture products such as cars, chairs and tables. We talked about how footballers such as Wayne Rooney need footballs, boots and goalposts, and about how that games console they had played on the previous night was designed and engineered by people within our industry. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
I ended up doing this talk for the whole school over a period of two weeks, albeit slightly modified for the older kids. But it got me thinking: imagine if others did this, too. How many more children would end up with a better appreciation of our industry, and might just consider design engineering as a future career? What if some of you reading this contacted your local schools and offered to give a talk to the kids about design engineering? How would that affect the future of design, engineering and manufacturing?
Over the years, there have been lots of articles in PE about how we can attract more youngsters into the profession. Maybe the answer is for engineers to be more proactive, and to do their bit to help get the message heard.