Electrical services Regulations

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no longer up to speed with regulatory requirements and best practice. ‘As they fall back to a defensive position, the clients

are not getting value for money, but a standard “budget type” of design and construction [which may have to be stripped out and replaced in order to meet tough new legislative requirements].’ Three big issues concern Moody – de-skilling of

the workforce, a lack of qualified people, and a lack of understanding of legislation. On de-skilling, he says: ‘I don’t believe that the

young people who come out of the GCSE level now are skilled to the level that they were 10 or 15 years ago. There has definitely been a dumbing down – the level of people coming into the industry has dropped and, as a consequence, all the upstream qualifications are being deskilled.’ When Moody did his apprenticeship 12 years ago, he

was required to pass City and Guilds Levels 1, 2, and 3 – which took four years. He says this qualification has now been replaced by the Electro-Technical Certificate, a two-year course. ‘An electrician who gets qualified now won’t know

as much as I did when I qualified, and I didn’t know as much as my boss did 10 years before me. I think that illustrates the problem – the qualifications are deskilling and it stems from the fact that GCSEs are easier.’ Sung has seen good specifications for electrical

The image of electrical engineers has suffered, according to some – the public associate them with fixing fridges rather than designing services.

services systems from many leading consultants and contractors in the UK and overseas. However, he adds: ‘The weaknesses and gaps that people perceive are due to an acute shortage of well-qualified electrical services graduates. ‘There is just too much work for too few of these

specialists in many of the professional practices and, sometimes, the design and specifications have to be released in a hurry. As a result the design might need

fine tuning and adjustments on site.’ But there is also a lack of national engineering specifications in electrical services – probably due to the wide range of systems that is encompassed by the electrical services title, says Sung: ‘This is certainly one of the gaps in new and retrofit projects. The other gap is the lack of further learning opportunities in electrical services engineering. At present there is no postgraduate degree on offer to cater for such further learning needs crying out loud from the industry.’

Brain drain

This brings us to Moody’s second big issue – a lack of qualified people. He says: ‘What happened a few years ago and, to a certain extent, is still happening, was that as soon as somebody got qualified up to chartered engineer status, they would leave the country because they could earn more money elsewhere; a lot of our workforce went to the Middle East.’ However, he adds, money is not the only reason for

this brain drain – part of the reason is the perceived low value placed on engineers in the UK: ‘In this country, you can call yourself an electrical engineer, but there could easily be a perception that this means you go around fixing fridges; the trouble is that people don’t differentiate between different grades of engineer.’ Paul Harris, an electrical engineer and CIBSE ESG

member, agrees that engineers tend to suffer from a poor image: ‘There is, in my view, not enough respect for engineers. I don’t know whether the industry has done this to itself. It’s not about attracting bright people, it is more about protecting the title “engineer”. That would be a step towards better recognition for the industry.’ Moody’s third main concern is, in his view, the lack

of understanding of legislation. He says: ‘For example, I might become an expert in the Wiring Regulations, earthing systems and so on, but I won’t necessarily

34

CIBSE Journal June 2010

www.cibsejournal.com

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