I am one of the least mechanical skilled of human beings. Fitting a key in a lock is about what I can do without expert help. My skills go to other things. However, my admiration for those who have mechanical skills knows no bounds. I marvel at the engineering skills of Michelangelo. Much of the world's high tech products are the result of refined and brilliant engineering. A brilliant idea and the product that comes from it is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. It's the engineers who do the perspiration thing. They make it work. Sometimes with as much elegance as befits the inventor.
Sir James Dyson, the British billionaire who made his money on vacuum cleaners is a case in point. Dyson is an inventor/engineer whose approach to marketing is, to say the least, unorthodox. Most companies survey the marketplace to measure demand before building a new product. Dyson does the reverse: he builds the product and depends on the consumer's intelligence to buy it. The approach has succeeded. Brilliantly.
But I digress. Dyson's point is that most advanced economies produce more business graduates than they do engineering graduates. In Britain alone there is an engineering deficit of about 25,000 jobs. Most emerging economies such as India, Brazil and China do the reverse. They promote engineering as a well paid and honoured profession. Singapore has it about right--it graduates just enough engineers to sustain its manufacturing economy.
Engineering leads to manufacturing jobs. In advanced economies it leads to a demand for workers who are highly educated and who, themselves, may have technical skills. In many advanced economies the education system is not only producing an engineering deficit but is also failing to produce educated students to fill high paying jobs. Those jobs go abroad not because labour is cheaper but because the labour force is better educated elsewhere. In Canada and the US and to some extent in Britain many students wind up in low paying service jobs not because higher paying jobs were exported but because they are ill educated and can't fill the higher paid jobs. With the financial crunch in the US hitting education hard, the trend to functional illiteracy and bad math skills will only make matters worse.
In Canada, Britain and the US many engineering students are of foreign extraction--either as recent immigrants or students from other countries. They have much to teach us. We should make it easier, not harder, for those students to stay on and work in the countries that gave them their education. As to domestic students of foreign extraction we should be looking to their family values where excellence is stressed and rewarded. As a first generation Canadian, failure at school was not an option. My parents had sacrificed their generation so that my generation could get ahead and I was not about to disappoint them.
The argument often heard is that we are in a "post industrial" economy. This is meant to mean that we are somehow ahead of those economies that are still "mired" in manufacture. But the emerging economies are beating the tar out of the more mature "post industrial" economies. Take China or Brazil. Their GDP growth are outperforms that of the most "post industrial" countries. In "post industrial" countries the industry of the economy is based largely on service rather than manufactured goods. Witness the banking industry that makes money on money. But, in the end, these service industries depend on someone making something. We cannot service ourselves into overall wealth.
The Western economies that have migrated to a "post industrial" economy have generally done badly. They can't repatriate jobs that were lost to China and India and they can't seem to educate their younger population to do something technically useful. Those who make money on money get richer and those who can't do that work at MacDonald serving hamburgers.
We suffer short sighted politicians who will not or cannot take the long view. President Kennedy's answer to Sputnik was to reform the education system in the US. We have no such leadership now in most Western countries. Government money is spent on war when it should be spent at home. We are educating a few at the top while the bottom lies mired largely in functional ignorance. We need to energize a whole generation to aspire to better things.
So, we do need more engineers. But before we get there we have to have an honest talk with each other. Something that the politicians are wont to do. We need to talk about what investment we are going to make in the future generations so that they can become useful citizens in an ever more complex world. Then, we'll get engineers.
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