• Question: Is the industry stagnating or is there a need for engineers within the next decade?

    Asked by Sasha.Pellegrini to Fe, Joe, Olivia, Pete on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Olivia Stodieck

      Olivia Stodieck answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      I just had a look at this article (http://www.engineeringuk.com/View/?con_id=490), quote: “Filling the demand for new engineering jobs will generate an additional £27 billion per year for the UK economy from 2022, the equivalent of building 1,800 schools or 110 hospitals, according to new research published in Engineering UK 2015 The State of Engineering. To meet projected employer demand the number of engineering apprentices and graduates entering the industry will need to double.”

      So it looks like there will definitely be a need for more engineers in the future! Is there a specific industry you are thinking about? From my own experience, I know that we generally need more aerospace engineers, although we tend to recruit in waves – whenever a new project starts, we recruit lots of people and then is goes a bit quiet again.

    • Photo: Felicity Harer

      Felicity Harer answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      There is always a need for more engineers! Engineering is constantly evolving – people like software engineers didn’t even exist a few decades ago and they’re everywhere now, a hundred years before cars didn’t exist and so my job wouldn’t have either. I expect to see a lot more of that as we embrace the internet even more and bring in new manufacturing techniques like additive manufacturing. We’re at a point where a lot of engineering developments are happening with individuals and startups (places like Makerspaces especially), not just big companies, and that means fast change and new fields of engineering appearing all the time.

    • Photo: Peter Roskilly

      Peter Roskilly answered on 18 Mar 2015:

      My firm hired over 150 graduates this year in the UK alone. The amount of work available in the construction industry tends to have peaks and troughs in line with the Economy, but currently we are very much “on the up”.
      Governments are investing heavily in their infrastructure. More and more ludicrous sky scrapers are being procured.
      If by stagnating you mean not innovating, then no. My industry is slow, so very slow, to embrace change because with change comes risk. Risk can cost lives as much as it can cost money. That being said innovation is typically a requirement of any job put out to tender.
      Designers, contractors and project managers are expected to find more efficient/safer/ cheaper/quicker ways of building what’s required.
      the next decade will see the rise of Building Information Modelling/Management (BIM, the M is debatable). New data sharing technologies and 3d modelling are being adopted across the industry as more and more clients expect them.

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