UK ENGINEERS RELISH WORKING WITH TECHNOLOGY AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Engineers in the United Kingdom have long had a complex relationship with their chosen profession. In almost any era of recent history, the industry has complained that it could not find enough engineers with the right skills. At the same time, engineers have frequently regarded themselves as under-rewarded in financial terms, and undervalued in society relative to their contemporaries in other professions. As long ago as the late 1970s, this concern became so acute that the British government set up an official inquiry into the engineering profession. Industrialist Sir Montague “Monty” Finniston conducted this inquiry, which in 1979 proposed a number of remedies to enhance the status of engineers and increase the flow of aspiring young engineers into the profession.

To judge by many indicators in the UK engineering scene, not much has changed in nearly 30 years. You still hear many of the same gripes. So, are the UK’s electronics designers an embittered and unhappy group? On the contrary, as a group, they seem to be happy with their chosen path.

A relatively recent entrant to the UK’s engineering community is hardware engineer Charlotte Doyle, who designs embedded-system-computer boards for Varisys, a UK-based supplier of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) and custom hardware for the embedded-computer market. Having worked in the industry for five years since graduating from university in 2002, Doyle says, engineering has been the right choice for her. She is happy with the position she holds and says that electronic design, with its problem-solving challenges, continues to hold her interest, as someone who came into the profession through enjoyment of the technology. Her job, she says, also offers the right combination of conditions and benefits, and the company she works for is “family-friendly”—a theme that recurs in talking to today’s UK engineering community. Within her field, she does not find that keeping up with technology is a particular issue. “There is time to keep up to date technically, as part of the problem-solving,” she says. Doyle would see an ideal career path as one that allowed her to stay in engineering, “perhaps more involved with project management,” but she has no wish to move into, for example, a sales or FAE (field-application-engineering) role.

When Doyle completed her university studies, financial institutions were trying to tempt engineering and science graduates away from technology and toward finance. The financial businesses told the recent graduates that the rigor of their scientific education would lend itself to this alternative career. “A number of people from my year group did that,” Doyle says, “and they currently have significantly better rewards than those of us who continued with engineering.” But she has no doubt that technology—and the engineering profession—has been the right choice for her.

Martin O’Hara is technical director at Danfoss Randall Ltd leading a team of 15 designers of systems for heating controls. With a career that has included posts with Ferranti, Newport Components (now C&D Technologies), and Motorola, O’Hara is an example of an engineer who has kept technology as the focus of his professional life. The rewards of the job, he says, have shifted throughout his career from the fascination with technology itself to those of managing the process: getting a product through to production and interacting with teams in other geographically distributed branches of his company. Danfoss is a Danish company; other locations that O’Hara works with are in Slovenia and in China.

O’Hara sees keeping up to date with technology as a significant challenge for himself and his team “in an environment of information overload.” In material terms and perhaps due to a career structure in which he has always chosen a new area of technology with each move, O’Hara believes that he has fared at least comparably and perhaps rather better than most with his peer group. He is also in a minority among UK engineers and engineering managers, in having added to his technological qualifications by earning a degree in management.
From a manager’s perspective, O’Hara sees one of the UK industry’s problems as a failure to attract sufficient young entrants to the profession, “In response to one of our recent advertisements, which was not specific on experience expected, no young graduates applied at all. All of the applicants were in the 35 to 45 age range,” he says. He values the freedom his current position offers him to “do what needs to be done” without excessive pressure on spending. There is no great pressure on him to outsource design work, although he does contract out some work—mainly software.

He says it is becoming more difficult to find engineers with cross-discipline knowledge—for example, analog and digital or hardware and software—or designers with application knowledge. Although he does not outsource design, O’Hara notes a negative trend emerging with the general move to offshore manufacturing. “Without the link to manufacturing,” he says, “the design community is losing design-for-manufacturing skills.”
The ultimate expression of a wish to move your career progression ahead is, of course, to look for a new job: One person who sees that process in action is Kay Alexander, divisional manager of John Prodger Recruitment, a UK-based agency that operates across the breadth of the UK electronics industry. When British engineers seek a move, Alexander says, it’s rarely just for financial reasons: More often, it’s about moving their careers forward. She confirms that by most UK engineers were initially attracted to the profession by their enthusiasm for the technology, and most would prefer a career path that keeps them in direct contact with engineering and continues to present technical challenges.

Because of the lure of technology, most engineers prefer an upward move into engineering management over, for example, a move to sales or marketing. Ultimately, as Alexander points out, “A company only needs one chief technology officer.” Where engineers do leave a mainstream career path—what Alexander describes as “leakage” to the profession—it’s most often to free-lance design work or into teaching; science teachers are in short supply in Britain’s schools.

Alexander sees a trend in the increasing determination of engineers to consider family-friendly and quality-of-life factors, such as working hours, flexible working time, or paternity leave—as well as maternity leave, which is a legal right in the United Kingdom as in most other European countries—alongside direct career issues, such as pay and technological challenges. “A few years ago, these ‘soft’ topics would have been mentioned only late in a job negotiation,” says Alexander. “Now, they are discussed right away. I think many companies have underestimated the contribution these factors can make to recruiting good people. It has become acceptable for engineers to put a high priority on these matters, whereas before it was not.”

O’Hara agrees with Alexander’s assessment. O’Hara adds that, as his current employer is a branch of a Danish company, its engineers do enjoy favorable conditions in that respect; Scandinavian countries and companies are noted for progressive policies.

It is more difficult as a UK engineer to build a career in engineering and make a lot of money. An engineer with a few years’ experience might earn under £30,000. Alexander observes a problem with experienced engineers, “Eight to 10 years ago [at the height of the dot-com ‘bubble’], a lot of engineers moved from, for example, defense into communications, which was relatively much better paid at the time. Now, there is interesting work opening up in defense and other areas. Companies need those experienced engineers, but cannot pay enough to tempt that cadre of engineers out of their current positions.”