Warning over shortage of engineering graduates - UK | Hacker News Reader

Warning over shortage of engineering graduates - UK

bbc.co.uk

I wonder if UK firms are falling in to the same trap as their Silicon Valley counterparts are reportedly falling into and are expecting fresh graduates to hit the ground running without training etc. Industry moves faster than academia and the fundamentals don't change - an electronics grad still need to know the basics and I don't think should be a universities job to also teach the industry leading flavours of the month which may change in 18 months time anyway.

This. I did an ee degree. When I hit industry I quickly realised that I knew nothing. The company expected otherwise.

Did they have training in place to fill the knowledge gap or (as I fear may be the case) was it considered your problem? What areas did you lack knowledge? I did an EEE degree too so interested to know as I went straight into launching a startup/company

We had no training in place. I was expected to catch up in my own time, which I did but it was hard. This was a NASDAQ/FTSE listed defence contractor.

Main things for me were by the time I left, we were in FPGA and microcontroller territory and mixed mode simulation rather than basic SPICE models etc. You need to look out for major industry trends and get on a community like Element14 [1]. Things have changed since when I graduated with respect to what gaps there will be but there will be gaps.

Looking at some colleagues and their complaints about graduates recently, people seem to want analogue, microwave, transmission line and network experts. I wouldn't know one end of a waveguide from another (I did digital mainly) so I'm not the person to ask :)

[1] http://www.element14.com/

Well it sounds like personal development wouldn't change too much from start up life should I need to go into industry, I'm improving my maths and systems level knowledge in my spare time as it is.

Thanks for the link, I'll take a look around. The current gap complaints you mention don't surprise me, I covered aspects of that in my undergrad but it was brief and fleeting and I promptly forgot a lot of it during my phd (high temperature semiconductors).

It's a pity the article wasn't able to dig deeper into the underlying causes.

I would suspect that the problem needs to be addressed much earlier on by both improving the quality of school tuition in engineering required subjects (maths, sciences etc) as well as raising the profile of engineering careers among both children and the general public.

I wonder if there is really a shortage of engineers or if there is only a shortage of engineers willing to work for below market pay?

From a market perspective, when there is truly a shortage of "X's" [science Phd's, teachers, engineers, etc] the price/salaries for "X's" go up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com