Engineering professions 1 Fair access


start Unequal


Leading professions such as the law and medicine stand accused of still being bastions of social and educational privilege and elitism. But how does engineering – and particularly the building services sector – compare when it comes to access and fairness? Simon Ellery investigates


equal access to top jobs. It’s an issue that also faces the building services sector, but is one which the sector says it is attempting to tackle head-on. However, at present there are still few role models


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for women in building services. For example, just over 5% of CIBSE’s members are women. For ethnic minorities, it seems that the sector is either not on their career radar or difficult to gain access into. Young female engineer Karen Beaumont told the


Journal that she found the sector hard to break into but was inspired after seeing her father at work, and since then she has focused on becoming an engineer. ‘Not all women are cut out to be engineers,’ she


says. ‘I was told that it would be too hard and this probably spurred me on along the way. I had a natural fascination with the fundamentals of engineering and how and why things work.’ This type of experience was highlighted in a UK


study published last year, Unleashing Aspiration: the Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, which found that the top professions in Britain were increasingly closed off to all but the most affluent (see the table on page 30). The report, produced by an independent panel


28 CIBSE Journal November 2010


ertain professions in Britain – primarily, the law, medicine, the media and banking and accountancy – have come under fire for having glass ceilings that prevent


of experts chaired by former Labour minister Alan Milburn, called for better careers advice and for more equal opportunities in education and employment to improve the prospects for young people. Earlier this year Milburn took up the post of social mobility ‘tsar’ for the UK coalition government, and so it remains to be seen how the panel’s finding will translate into public policy.


Vocational route The recession has worsened the drive to widen the pool of people coming into the profession, according to some. SummitSkills, the skills body for the building services engineering sector, has warned of a loss of up to 5,500 apprenticeships. Tim Dwyer, the Journal’s technical editor and


formerly a professor in the engineering faculty at London South Bank University, says: ‘There are great opportunities to realign expectations of both the public and government on the need for traditional degree- level education to meet the vocational educational needs of the sector.’ He supports the NVQ as a means to introduce new


entrants and urges industry to support it. ‘My limited experience with this process has been that CIBSE and the building services sector in general are far ahead in many ways in attempts to improve accessibility to the profession at all levels.’


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