Burning issue
Plugging the skills gap
The biggest threat to the economic recovery is the shortage of skilled workers, says Lochinvar MD David Pepper
in activity right across our industry means the scramble for appropriately skilled people has begun in earnest. And if we employers don’t get this right, the whole economic recov- ery could be in danger.
The recent Perkins Report highlighted the frightening fact that the UK will need to find 1.3 million new engineers by 2020 to be able to deliver all of its ambi- tious infrastructure targets. There are lots of theories about how this might be achieved and plenty of rhetoric around the topic, but lit- tle sign of a rise in actual recruits. This is also not solely about recruiting more young people or addressing the gender bias in our industry. From a building servic- es perspective we also have to be a lot smarter about how we use the skills we already have. How we deliver technical solutions has changed radically in the past 20 years, but have our recruitment habits? Even since the economic crash clients’ demands have changed out of all recognition. This means, while traditional mechanical engineering skills remain important, individual workers must also have a range of new skills and employers must make sure they have the right portfolio of expertise.
Culture
Building Information Modelling (BIM), for example, is likely to change the landscape and the cul- ture of our supply chain by shak- ing up how projects are designed, built and handed over. BIM is already driving wider adoption of offsite fabrication of building services; it forces specialist con- tractors to step up and contribute to the design process at an earlier stage and requires the ‘traditional’ supply chain to engage more closely with facilities managers (FMs) because of the importance
10 | September 2014 | HVR
David Pepper
of designing for ongoing opera- tion of the building.
Can we be confident that our workforce is up to these tasks? There has also been a notable shift towards demand for energy efficiency ahead of renewables; reflecting the reality of tighter budgets, reorganisation of gov- ernment subsidies and soaring gas and electricity prices. That is not to say renewables are going away, but the market has a dif- ferent emphasis – so our work- force needs to be organised accordingly. Training provision needs to be flexible and geared towards upgrading existing skills as well as providing new ones. So the emphasis has to be as much on existing workers and encourag- ing them to add to their knowl- edge as much as recruiting new entrants to the industry.
The controls industry is a good case in point. Most building serv- ices equipment is now delivered with ‘on board’ controls already built in so increasingly controls engineers are required to focus on integration and ensuring all the different system components can ‘talk’ to each other.
This is a hugely important task because without that interoper-
ability a building will fail to meet its energy efficiency targets. Systems will end up fighting each other rather than working in tan- dem to deliver the best occupan- cy conditions at the lowest cost. With that in mind, the Building Controls Industry Association (BCIA) has developed a new qualification aimed at giving con- trols engineers a higher profes- sional status – the Building Controls Professional Assessment (BCPA). This gives apprentices a higher qualification to aim for, but is also something that exist- ing professionals can use as a stepping stone to improving their own engineering credentials. There is a limit to how much specialist manufacturers can do to address such a huge industry-wide problem, but we can play our part and encouraging existing workers to upgrade their skills and sup- porting them to take on additional qualifications is important. At Lochinvar we support apprentices and, if they want to move on to higher education, we will encourage them because we will get the benefit of their addi- tional expertise and knowledge.
Confidence
An apprentice who understands the ‘bigger picture’ of how a building operates and how our products fit into that building is a valuable asset who can give con- tractors and specifiers that extra bit of confidence.
Also, if our industry is to be defined by BIM and the increas- ing sophistication of building services systems – particularly how equipment is controlled – then our engineers need to understand how that works. Otherwise we risk being left behind and eventually excluded from the sector if we don’t embrace the ‘digitalisation’ of our profession. The fact we are mod- ernising as an industry and work with high tech systems should give us an opportunity to extend our appeal to a wider pool of potential recruits.
Popular TV scientist Brian Cox recently blamed parents for the fact that just 4,000 ‘girls’ applied to do science and engineering degrees at British universities last year compared to 28,000 ‘boys’. He suggested that girls are dis- couraged from entering ‘techni- cal’ professions and so engineer- ing misses out on thousands of potential top quality recruits.
According to City & Guilds, just 17 per cent of young women are encouraged to take up an apprenticeship in school com- pared with one third of young men. Their survey of 2,000 young professionals suggested this was largely to do with social ‘percep- tions’ of what was an appropriate career path for a young woman. The National Apprenticeship Service says that stereotyping is rife within construction related professions with just 0.6 per cent of women encouraged to enter the industry – compared with 12 per cent of men, who are also four times more likely to study engineering at school.
This is all to do with the image of engineering. It is still often regarded as an ‘oily rag’ job with little in the way of career prospects – yet we are now a modern, high tech profession with plenty to offer young people of both sexes and people from all backgrounds. There are now very few roles in the engineering pro- fession that could be charac- terised as ‘unsuitable’ for physical reasons. This is now a modern, highly technical industry populat- ed by highly creative people working in a digital environment. There are no barriers to young women coming into engineering other than those perceived by older generations. And while we complain about teenagers sitting in front of computers all day, in fact that might be just the grounding they need for a future in engineering design.
The use of gaming technology
is a perfect apprenticeship for cre- ating virtual reality ‘walk through’ designs in BIM models at Level 3 and beyond. The Class of your Own project, which has devel- oped engineering related courses for school children that comple- ments their GCSE studies, has proved this theory by giving chil- dren as young as 11 the opportu- nity to create BIM models – and the results have been startlingly. Young people embrace this kind of technology and can easi- ly be enthused about a potential career in building design if it is properly presented to them. The key, therefore, is to promote the opportunities in engineering – particularly the sustainability and social improvement aspects of building services engineering – and the opportunities to work with the latest digital tools. Oily rags are firmly in the past.
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