The lack of good management - not a skills shortage

[MeJasonT]

i wrote this a couple of years ago and sent it to press and politicians funny thing is no one wanted to respond
It was titled - The decline of British Engineering and manufacturing in the 21st Century, although based on the situation in the uk is very relevant to engineering in both the US and the UK

The skills shortage saga

Nobody can deny that the trade training test piece taught us skills we will never forget; firstly machines are better than doing things by hand for those of us who can’t be arsed. But secondly how many of us have had to cut out weird shapes using a hacksaw, chisel and files since. They say there is a skills shortage amongst today's young engineers and the reason is that unfortunately universities are really poor at teaching bench work. I don't know of any of these kids who have had to endure the pain of making a test piece by hand.



Courtesy of Tom rockwells post on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=3&theater


Firstly we need a clearer definition of what an engineer is.
If I work on a farm, I’m a farmer. If I work in engineering, well that depends are you a graduate then ok you can join the club. If you don’t then I suppose you’re a technician.

Ok seems clear, so a technician is anyone else aged between 18 -85 either skilled or un skilled and with or without experience. Clear as mud.

I propose better accreditation for engineers.
Firstly like farming, if you work in the field of engineering you are an engineer.
But failing that being accepted as normal by the EU boys club, we need a military style ranking system or simply go back to the old system:-

Apprentice
Craftsman
Technician

At this point it starts to get vague, if ive been a technician for twenty years what is my progression if I’m not a graduate. (Don’t say get a degree, skilled people tend to be animal like and will throw hammers in response to such arrogant statements.)

Signing up for a degree at forty is a pointless exercise, say it takes five years to obtain the degree – so you are now 45. You apply for a position with a company only to find the whippet snappers are cheaper and have at least 10 years’ experience now. So I can now look forward to a forced early retirement as a fully qualified engineer.

The question then becomes do we really need such highly qualified individuals for less academic positions. As I see it the major problem with the NHS recruiting nurses at this moment in time is the requirement of nurses to have a degree, surely a good bedside manner and the ability to deal with a patients physical need is all that is required. There will no doubt be the argument that now they are required to do more technical and challenging aspects of the job such as dispensing drugs.
Forgive me if I’m wrong but care workers can dispense drugs and they tend not to be graduates or expected to be. Neither the nurse nor the care worker are pharmacists nor are they allowed writing prescriptions. A care worker may also do exactly the same daily tasks as a nurse without qualification. As I understand it there are now clinical nurses who assist in operations and perform minor surgery. Fine make that a position and put the entry level back to no degree required for entry into this role.

The qualification needs to fit the roll, engineering is operating in a similar way to that of the nurse where employers are asking for qualification that far outweighs that necessary for the position, the UK has made a huge mistake in how the workforce is constructed, things really do need to change. Employers/companies can’t complain about the lack of skills and physically prevent half the workforce from gaining employment. If it was down to sex or race all hell would break loose but effectively making half the population unemployable is acceptable.

The use of agencies for recruitment is simply adding to the poor recruitment of skilled craftspeople. Where an employer sends the job requirement to an agency, they stipulate the exact credentials that the candidate must have. At this stage is most likely includes the requirement for the applicant to be a graduate. It would appear Employers fail to understand the difference between engineers and academics when it comes to the recognition of skills. When the recruiter receives the job posting they will then attempt to fit would be applicants against a formula, as graduates are taught the same subject in the same manner they present themselves in a similar way, this inevitably results in them appearing to be a perfect match for the recruiters formula. The independent skilled craftsperson will have a vast array of skills and will appear dissimilar to others and will not fit the recruiter’s formula. You also fall short of recruiting the best candidate as recruiters on the whole will have little knowledge of your business and even less of the applicants skill set. Therefore it goes without saying that if you are looking for a needle in a haystack perhaps the recruiter’s formula method is not the best. The new job application search software available is another hindrance to recruiting skilled people; this software usually likes to see multiple uses of key words. If I mention my ability to program PLC’s on my CV I would consider that to be sufficient and would not presume the reader to be and idiot and explain how I might do that simply to gain more words for an application search tool. The software also works against skilled people in that the accumulation of skills can result in quite a lengthy CV.

From an applicant’s point of view being analysed by a recruiter for a position for a company who wishes to distance themselves from you is very impersonal, skilled crafts people tend to be highly creative and with it slightly highly strung. If you wish to distance yourself from a potential applicant then it’s going to be a huge shock when you finally meet. Is this really the best way of selecting the best people for your business.


There becomes a point when you are paying no better than the minimum wage and expecting so much that skilled people stop wanting to be in engineering as is the case. If you also consider that the large manufacturing plants have gone and the lean business models of the 80s and 90s have meant a big reduction in labour in order to maximise profits. Then there are not the positions available for skilled people to apply for.

How many recruiters have provided feedback and encouragement to unsuccessful applicants in order to point them in the direction of improvement and retain them in the labour pool for future recruitment by themselves or others.

The professional organisations such as the IIE etc have done the profession a great injustice, it is their belief, mantra if you will that a professional working in the engineering field must be an academic and possess a degree. Your skilled craftsman will not be an academic nor could he/she possibly gain a degree as the various skill sets obtained by years of experience are not taught at university and if they were it would be even more unlikely to gain all the required skills at once .
The professional organisations are also failing to promote engineers, yes the promote engineering by showing off the big companies and the high standards they achieve – you would hope so they have the money.
But ignoring the skills and ability of lesser mortals in the profession has led to these organisations becoming elitist.

Another serious issue is skilled craftspeople don’t have a voice, as industry and society and professional bodies like the IIE have favoured the academics over the last twenty years, craftspeople have been unable to get noticed. What has happened has been Dickensian, the professional bodies have failed to promote or recognise skills and effectively belittled those working with their hands.

Some would argue that with the robot revolution there will be no need for manual workers (these are actually skilled workers, we are called manual because we use our hands and get dirty). The industry wont get very far without those who assemble the robots and those who will fix them when engineers are all glued to a chair.

I have a number of friends who have found themselves in a similar position to myself, all of us have achieved 30 years + in engineering and have acquired a multitude of skills along the way. The one thing we all have in common not including our age is that we came from a generation who didn’t go to university so not one of us has a degree.
D. ended his career at the point of being an engineering manager being responsible and hands on for the repair of machinery and the companies IT.
N. Ex Royal Navy, worked for many years as an offshore submersible professional
P. Ex RAF promised the earth at a job interview and found the company failed in all aspects of their promises and left totally disillusioned.
Myself Ex Royal Navy and worked as a civilian for the RAF, high speed food manufacturing, working offshore with submersibles, R&D for various clients and now totally disillusioned with engineering.

That’s four friends just off the top of my head who feel the way we are treated is horrendous and have walked away from the industry, I have colleagues who have taken early retirement from being electricians due to the governments new rules regarding competency and the additional expense of part P plus the additional annual charge of becoming the member of an organisation and the now almost yearly study and re qualification on the latest addition to the wiring regs. The fee costing in excess of £4000 for a lone trader certainly made an impact into their profits.
Again of the three individuals I’m referring to, not one has a degree.

A picture should be starting to emerge here that skills are being lost due to ignorance of both employers and the organisations who have managed to twist the arms of government officials in order to promote their elitist engineering profile.

Girls in engineering, yes we should employ more girls into engineering, unfortunately there are issues which are causing a serious imbalance to the industry. Girls are encouraged in with assistance to gain qualification (ie a degree) and have their fees paid. This is sexist and probably illegal if it were challenged in the courts, why should males be treated differently and have to pay their own way through university to achieve the same position. The ladies tend to choose engineering roles which put them at the top of the industry usually in an office environment, it has been my experience that most girls I have worked alongside are not involved or not teamed up with the men performing mundane and dirty work. There has been the odd oily black angel impressing the Neanderthals amongst us – but I stress few.
I have only been aware of ten ladies becoming engineers whom did not have a degree and they were the first WREN’s to serve on board HMS Brilliant as marine engineering mechanics for the Royal Navy.

If we look back at how many women were working in engineering/manufacturing between 1939 -1945, there was no shortage, ok the men were off fighting wars but the women volunteered to fill those roles. The end of the war created a few situations where a few women who wanted to remain in engineering were made redundant, but the vast majority went home to start families as they were prevented from doing so during wartime with their partners away at war. The profession has never prevented women form working as engineers more often they have chosen predominantly female roles. It’s strange that there is still an obsession to have more women in engineering but it’s almost getting to the point of forcing them into it. Whether it’s a man or a woman they have to want to be engineers and the owness is actually on employers and the industry to make engineering look enticing.
There will certainly be more women on the frontline in the next war as many men have become seriously disillusioned with the way they have been treated after serving the country, if we think recruitment of engineers is hard wait until we try and convince soldiers who were laid off after serving in the gulf to sign up again.

If I compare myself to a colleague who is a graduate of engineering, the guy is very young and naïve and seriously lacking in any knowledge of engineering, unfortunately he had to be shown everything. I saw one of his assignment question sheets once; it was identical to one I had on the HND. When I left school and entered the workplace I could strip down cars and already had quite a good understanding of Electrics and Electronics, I had a thirst for knowledge and didn’t waste all of my time on computer games or texting. I tried to gain a position with a company in the North East which offered 3rd line support to the MOD, I was told just they had taken on a trainee/graduate and I would need to have similar qualifications to be considered. I spoke to the friend I had originally asked about a position how the guy was getting on. I was informed he had parted company with the company, without saying too much an example was given that he had been asked to devise a system where a detection circuit would be employed to dial up a lost communications connection between two dedicated terminals. After eight months he had failed to produce any work or research for even a preliminary design idea.

So with the aim of comparison on a 1:1 basis who should an employer be considering in order to improve his companies skill base, it appears to be self-evident that the insistence of graduates for all current vacancies is leading to the dramatic decline of skilled people working within the industry.

This also has a knock on effect with the creativity and ingenuity required by the industry to produce new products and to a lesser degree the research into product development. I accept that product development requires the mathematicians and boffins to produce the finite elements of a design but the practical experience of skilled people is what makes the difference between a first to production based project and a forever reworked design idea. Say for example the design office come out with a design for a new car, the design is passed down to manufacturing and one of the craftsmen say’s that wont work. The usual attitude is well we are professionals with titles and qualifications what do you know, it’s a vehicle with four wheels and everything you would expect from a car – whats wrong with it. There will be the cheesiest grin on the craftsman’s face as he tells you the wheels are too close together and when you brake the car will tip onto its bumper.

Ok the story is far out there but the point remains, in your business how many times have you had the engineers and craftsmen on the shop floor send drawings back upstairs for blindingly obvious errors. Even minor errors that have simply been missed. It takes a team to operate a business and you are only as successful as the team, if you remove key players from the team then you are expecting to succeed with a deficiency. A football analogy would be trying to win an FA cup final with only 10 players, you would most certainly hope that either of the missing two players wasn’t the goalie. You could argue in your lean team you didn’t need the goalie as most of the action is in the mid field and only occasionally is the goalie required. Edging your bets on not requiring skilled crafts people is like playing without your goalie, that’s a huge gamble.

What else do skilled craftsmen offer that the boffins don’t, well they are independent thinkers, they are not tied to a regimented parrot fashioned way of learning. If a university delivers a fresh new student you can guarantee that the other 30 members of his class were given the same material to learn showed the same examples and educated by the same profession with his own eccentric and aristocratic idiotism’s. How many years has he been lecturing – 10 for eg. You the employer have a gene pool of 300 students from a local university over a ten year period who’s education is almost a clone of each other. For years now industry has expected to thrive and maximise its profits whilst remaining stagnant and blinkered in its belief it had the best staff as they were all equally highly educated. Educated yes, skilled no.

Being at brunt of this so called skills shortage im discouraged by the implication that im a lesser individual as a result of not having a degree, to be honest I like many feel that when someone is blowing their own trumpet and acting the big I am, I just let them get on with it. You wont employ skilled crafts people because you don’t want them but you want their skills

There is now a huge skills gap, twenty years to be exact. That’s the point at which industry decided that it would only employ graduates as most youngsters were now encouraged to go to university. Apprenticeship schemes were a thing of the past and college places for engineering lacked investment and were now in decline. Nothing was done to reset the balance until recently, the major sticking point now is the students who would have become craftsmen were 18 - 20 years old. As they were not academic its unlikely they would attend university, however they will still have gained skills in the workplace. Now nearing 40 years old and hearing of a skills shortage they are still undesirables, this comes down to two reasons, 1. The march of change for the craftsman is currently very slow. 2. He/she is now too old to employ which is complicated by the requirement of a mans wage (not being sexist, ok bread winners wage). At 40 years old one is likely to have a mortgage, kids, married. The minimum wage is not going to meet their families requirements.

Having gained skills in low paid employment and having twenty plus years’ experience, why would a skilled craftsperson wish to work for minimum wages. If you start a graduate on £26,000 with no experience and no skills and then expect a 40 year old to work for £17,000 then I’m afraid there is your skills shortage. If the industry is not prepared to respect and reward skills then Britain’s industry will end up in the dark ages.



Another factor regarding poor recruitment of skilled workers is staff retention, it may seem strange to discuss holding onto staff as a reason for not being able to recruit staff. As you can imagine many out of work or despondent workers may feel let down by employers in the past, if you wish to recruit a skilled person then surely your job posting should be welcoming and inclusive. If for example you make the requirements sound unobtainable, only a basic remuneration package and for the minimum wage. Say you next expect flexibility and Saturdays as required, you could also request changes to working hours at short notice then finish off by saying other duties as required. If it sounds like a reasonable job advert then ask your wife/husband if they would accept a job with that description, I can assure you I would receive violence for thinking such meanness and stupidity.
That’s 80% of job adverts


It’s not so long ago that job ads used to read,
“We are looking for someone aged between 20 and 30 years of age with a degree and ten years’ experience.” I’ll explain why this is wrong on so many levels. A degree takes four years + ten years’ experience = aged 34.

People are prepared to work for low wages but don’t wish to feel they are being held in Guantanamo.

The Oil giant BP installed a coffee bar in one of their office buildings, staff were able to go up to the bar at any time during the day and take a coffee break (drinks could be taken back to your desk also) because it gave the impression of a more relaxed working environment, workers started to spend more time at work. The office productivity also increased, even sickness reduced. The point being it doesn’t take much to show respect and appreciation to get what you want.

If a disrespected, disillusioned worker who is sick of not being able to make ends meet and support their family, who is fed up of low paid job prospects looks at the advert above, then the employer doesn’t have a cat in hells chance of obtaining the skilled workers required.

Jams – just about managing
The government’s description of the working class, well!
The pay band was £17,000 - £34,000, it’s sad to think that an entire county in the North of England are all JAMS, The wages have remained stagnant for 12 years and the sign of a pay rise is a national increase in the minimum wage.
When trying to understand the effects on poor recruitment and retention of skilled workers you must also consider that low wages and high expectations are incendiary to your recruitment ambitions.



Do employers really understand the level of qualifications?
I have been at interviews where my HND was considered insufficient and had I gained an ONC I would have been considered for the position. Unfortunately I never stayed the full duration of the interview, having politely agreed and left the office. Its great playing god on an interview panel but if you wish to recruit a valuable asset for your company, is it not worth some effort. It’s even more Ludacris when a company with a HR department uses agencies to recruit.

Having trawled the internet looking for reference to support projects I’ve been working on as a hobby I have been surprised how similar my designs and creations have been to online professional thesis written towards final submission towards a degree. It has made me realise that I have the potential of writing approximately 10 thesis a year. This has led to in-depth reasoning as to whether perhaps perusing a degree is not such a bad idea. If as a skilled person one possesses such ability and expertise then surely that would be very desirable to employers in industry. Having had numerous discussions on online forums it’s obvious that many Hobbyist’s and crafts people are capable of producing fantastic products and solutions on their own initiative. It evident that many skilled individuals are there for the taking but employers are failing to tap into the resources. For example there are many people out there who have built their own 3D printer, If they have actually handcrafted every single part themselves and assembled the full machine instead of buying and assembling a kit, then surely this would be a remarkably skilled individual. There are guys who are working on 3D scanners, coordinate measuring machines, Bathometric sensors, CNC plasma and milling machines. The skills are most definitely out there.

The future of universities /Retraining opportunities
Will universities actually enjoy their current financial success in the future, I think not. Many businesses are considering bringing training back in-house

Cost
Returning as an adult – 16 year wipe out
Apprenticeships + entry age limits
In house graduate programs + entry age limits

Logical thinking behind recruiting your first employee
Being a keen follower of John Saunders on NYCCNC on YouTube I was inspired to mention him as part of this analysis into the recruitment shortage of skilled workers.
John had no engineering qualifications and lived in an apartment block in New York, he bought himself a milling machine and taught himself machining, He expanded his small apartment job shop to the extent he had to move out and find a home with a large garage. From there he has now expanded into quite a large concern which he has located on his family ranch in Ohio. John now at the top of his game was considering taking on a machinist. His podcast on YouTube is his dilemma of how he should go about employing someone and if he should even consider doing so. Like many self-employed operators or small enterprises John tried to justify filling a 40 hour week to necessitate having a new member of staff, his dilemma was that he could only see the time it would take to train someone and the work he was already capable of fulfilling himself. John then comes to the conclusion that actually he was looking at the problem all wrong, it wasn’t weather he could afford and justify a new member of staff but that the new staff member would increase his productivity. He didn’t need to divvy the work up to justify filling the hours but use the extra pair of hands to achieve a greater output. Its pure magic, everyone I have worked for has used the blinkered approach of how can I find enough work to justify making them busy. John describes how an employee should be considered in much the same way as a machine, you bring work in to feed the machine not buy a machine because you think you have a years’ worth of work for it.

The pod cast is here

2:00 onwards

I can’t keep banging on about it enough, recruiters are looking in the wrong place, and there is a huge out pouring of skilled individuals out there. Why is the industry incapable or reluctant to tap into it, perhaps its more desirable to look for cheap foreign labour and the noise is simply to get the government to open the flood gates and drive down UK wages. I am of the opinion engineering employers in the UK are destroying a fantastic occupation and career in engineering for many and insulting their intelligence by saying there is a skills shortage when they themselves are the recipient regarding skills. What they need to remember is engineers are born - there isn’t a degree course for one year olds. There are however courses for academics with the intelligence of one year Old’s.

As employers now heavily recruit from universities/graduates there will be a skills shortage. Society is changing to treat /ignore manual skilled manual skilled workers as being common and lesser individuals. The wages for graduates was very poor at one stage, however they are now increasing as employers are sifting through to get the top graduates are and are in competition other employers similarly the craftsman's wages have reduced only capped from falling any further by the minimum wage. There will be a situation within the next 10 to 15 years where skilled trades will no longer be an option as those who desire such an occupation won't bother as a result of such the wages. This is not just an engineering issue but is evident amongst all manual occupations leading to a shortage of workers to fill the roles.
It is a question of aspirations the rich don't need the money but are obsessed with maintaining their stature and well they are almost gambling to increase their wealth as a hobby or obsession. The middle-class wants the lifestyle they think they should have and deserve. Unfortunately practical people will always end up being treated like subservient workers as those who don't want to get their hands dirty think dirty work is beneath them and therefore psychologically they decide people who work in the dirt are beneath them.

The workers just don't want to have two worry about bills or unemployment, a holiday would be nice -- being able to afford a roof over their heads might be pushing it. Over last 20 years it has become difficult if not impossible to better oneself due to the cost and again the availability of options. There will be antagonists who believe this is not true.

Here is an example
a forty year old in the North of England/Northwest Scotland wishes to change career path as they can no longer gain employment in engineering due to the lack of employers and industry. Using their skills set they would perhaps look for other areas of engineering, avionics, fire safety, petrochemical etc. The first stumbling block is the availability of college courses; my local college caters for a tire factory, to food factories and Sellafield. The courses are offered are very limited in what they offer, the companies themselves are disillusioned with the quality of the courses offered. Adult career advice is nil, okay there is limited advice if you are signed on as an employed and is offered by civil servants with no knowledge of engineering.
If you have a mortgage, a family to support and quite big loans already , is pursuing a degree really an option especially one which would require a move to an area where there were more educational/career options. Lets be realistic these individuals will not get loans to pursue further education and if my miracle they can then the loan only supports the individual and not their dependence. In wealthy areas universities are boosted by investment companies wishing to carry out research and product development -- this investment is imperative that the future development of the country. This investment creates many benefits, the students in the university's are taught with the methods and in subjects which are highly desirable to the investor/employer. They themselves benefit from having a never-ending source of adequately trained employees -- they get free labour for their research, from many minds and from many backgrounds.

The North of England, south-west Scotland and the Borders do not get the investment/research grants or at the very least our limited by the number of available investors as there are insufficient employers/companies let alone finding them willing to invest in educational establishments. This is with the exception of the large cities like Newcastle and Glasgow and its surrounding areas which have received government investment coupled with private investment in pushing technology. The same can't be said of Cumbria which as one of the largest counties which covers over 10% of the country's land mass if you include the border area. That is a huge swathe of the country lacking employers and investment. The North of England as a whole is experiencing the same.

The government's new label for the less well-off “JAM” (just about managing) should be a wake-up call to the government and are the social consciousness and empathy of corporations as to their responsibility for putting people before profit. The jams aren't those on less than £35,000, I have only one response to the Prime Minister and that is she does not realise that there are entire counties in the United Kingdom to which this applies, the average wage in Cumbria is £22,000 most work for less.

Andrew Hawley from the Bank of England reported on the stagnation/tail end of productivity he reports how the stagnation of productivity is directly linked to employee’s fulfilment in the workplace.


It take an extremely brave company to stand back and break the circle, using the model of Cadbury and workers before profit is going to be hard but is now necessary as the current thinking is leading to mass unemployment and dissatisfaction. Many are still using the American business model from the 1980s and as can be observed from the current state of the US it has a lead to mass unemployment for them also.

My prediction is that things will change but not fast enough and not until the damage is done. The next 20 years will see the wilful destruction of the NHS leading to a major health crisis which when combined with current employment situation in the UK will lead to a crash on a biblical scale. We only need to look towards our American neighbours to realise the outcome of our current train of thought. There is a choice to make steps to avoid it now or pay a huge price later. Whilst the NHS free and not on subscription the working class can at least stay alive, if you were to compare with an ant colony, the colony would almost certainly die without its worker ants. In simple terms it is unlikely that the well-off are going to get their hands dirty performing menial tasks when the workers have all expired.

Youth
I don't think bringing back the National service is the answer but a cadet programme using mothballed military establishments would put a great deal back into the community by teaching youngsters skills, show them comradeship and broadening their horizons more akin to the Duke of Edinburgh scheme than military school. The cost of which would be cheaper than paying unemployment benefit and temporarily solve the housing shortage of young people.