More than half of graduates feel 'unprepared' for work
Only 43 per cent of engineering graduates believe their university course provides them with the skills they need for work.
More than 7,000 engineering students from 40 UK universities were questioned as part of trendence’s 2012 Graduate Barometer research, with key findings also showing that 57 per cent are willing to relocate worldwide upon graduating to find work.
According to a statement, the research studied a total of 25,000 students across all disciplines and found that, although 70 per cent of engineering students think it will be tough to find a good job this year, their optimism levels are higher than UK students generally at 75 per cent against 66 per cent.
A total of 41 per cent of engineering students are willing to work for nothing to get a good internship, with findings also showing they are most likely to be influenced by those close to them when it comes to career choices.
Mariana Rajic, senior marketing manager at trendence, said: ‘The findings paint an interesting picture of what future engineering talent is thinking and feeling when it comes to their career prospects.
‘Although they are positive about their futures, it is worrying that such a significant proportion of students do not feel well equipped to enter the labour market.
‘Couple this with their willingness to relocate out of the UK to find work and the message is clear — we must ensure we do not lose our engineering talent, either to other countries or because of a perceived lack of work skills.’
Despite a push by many companies to make recruitment sites mobile enabled, those from engineering are least likely to use mobile devices to identify and apply for jobs.
They are also unlikely to use social media to find out about a prospective employer, with only 25 per cent saying they do this compared with 39 per cent in IT, 29 per cent in law and an overall figure from UK students of 35 per cent.
Other findings show that, on average, engineering students expect to work 44 hours a week and want to earn £23,000 in their first role — less than their counterparts in IT and law.
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Readers' comments (12)
Very few university courses prepare students for the realities of work or searching for work in the economic climate we now live in.
In my opinion, students and graduates need to be helping themselves by gaining some really good work experience or an internship with a company - only this will really prepare them and make them more employable. I know it did for me.
Have a look at my blog if you get a chance - it's a fun, tongue in cheek, account of my struggles since graduating.
http://gutsy-grad.blogspot.co.uk/
This article is too true, without my sandwich year during my course I would have been truly lost in where to apply, what type of job to go for and also what to expect from it. Fortunately I had worked before going to university as well so half knew what was coming.
One thing that all grads should prepare to expect is that most roles require hardly any knowledge learnt during university, but most of the softer skills learnt - team working, leadership etc...
Courses are too theoretical and too remote from actual real world applications such that when a graduate is faced with their first job they are completely out of their depth: often trying to apply irrelevant theory and approaches to simple tasks.
I have seen graduates attempt to size a transformer based not on the downstream load it is expected to carry but on the upstream impedance of the network and these are people who have done all the analytical modelling under the sun.
Teaching theory without a practical context makes the learning too abstract and means graduates are often left bewildered as to how to use the skills they've learnt and sometime this leaves them looking silly in interviews, which is helpful to no-one.
Surely all the more reason to focus on Higher National type qualifications?
University courses are NOT an apprenticeship for a particular job nor are they intended to provide directly applicable knowledge. The mind is being trained, you should end up with an ability to analyze and see what is required of you and then to go about applying yourself to the task. It does not provide you with the answers necessarily. The real problem is that undergraduates pursue a course which appeals to them without having thought out beforehand, how and in what field they might apply themselves afterwards. Hence the advantage of working before and during a course with an internship or similar arrangement.
I have taught at 3 so-called Universities and one that was worthy (almost) of that title. I have taught Management, Engineering topics Quality management, Textile technology, Strategic Planning, Marketing and all the so-called 'soft' skills required. I also taught the first year remedial mathematics classes. I did not start teaching at such a high level? until aged 50:
I look at most of the content, all of the traditional methods of teaching courses (as used by my colleagues) the administration and all of the testing and examination regimes at most places of HE and simply shake my head in disbelief that such waste, misconduct, improper use of facilities, failure(s) to prepare (not withstanding the suggestion that students are taught to think...by traditional routes) students who now have to pay, along with the State and their parents so much for what is a very poor 'service' .
I did have the good fortune to win outright the HEA Engineering Award in session 2003/4 for best/most innovative UK lecturer: and was promptly removed from teaching! A situation I had 'engineered' to two other so-called Universities to see the extent of the problems as a part of my academic research.
Lunacy and grossly inadequate service would be mild words to describe what my researches have uncovered.
Mike B
Of course they do - I was fortunate to be able to undertake my sandwich with a fantastic company, under the tuition of some supremely talented engineers - there is no doubt that the 40 weeks I spent working with them made the jump into emplyoment much easier, but it was still a huge step, different company, different set of standards, different systems and practices.
Sitting on the other side of the fence now and seeing the grads entering the business, we still reckon on 12 months for someone to properly get their teeth into the job.
Not many surprises here. With few sponsorships available (28 years ago, 2/3 of my Mech Eng course were sponsored), there is less application learned by students. Most disastrously, the indolent, inward-looking education system has, certainly in Engineering, given us a huge number of graduates who are quite literally unemployable becasue they are not taught the most basic engineering fundamentals. The basic tenet of education today seems to be to study to a test then forget that and focus on the next module, not to build knowledge progressively. Hence, when I interview mech eng graduates, few can stress a basic beam.
On MEng courses, there is far too much focus on woolly project work and too little on teaching.
To top that the new head of admissions in the UK is supposed to have declared that first year undergraduates should not be failed for any reason.
The current University system, focussing on quantity over quality (and that's not all their fault) is not fit for purpose. Last year, out of more than 600 CV's received, we could not identify enough candidates to interview for eight places.
Regardless of the fact that useless graduates do exist (in a proportion not at all undershooting the number of useless engineers), many comments also reflect a general inability of employers to identify skill, quality of education, and, most important of all, talent.
Of course in a country vastly underrating engineering as a profession, best demonstrated by the emergence of photocopier "engineers" who are also considered to be engineers, it is not surprising. By the way, photocopier "engineers" earn 28k on average, look it up, so do not expect top grads to even talk about anything less. You get what you pay for, if you offer 25k for university grad engineers, you can hint yourself about the quality you get for your money. This includes the usual 6 to 12 month "get familiar with our technology" period. What a joke. Do you seriously design your whole business strategy like this? Maybe there is an underlying reason for the recent recession NOT exclusively related to banks per se.
Additionally, the UK engineering arena very rarely shows interest in actual good candidates, preferring to employ the layman - in many cases, simply because the previous generation now in management positions are in fear of their positions being taken from them faster than they could move up the ladder. Pathetic, and directly detrimental to corporate development, too.
I certainly would not employ anyone who did an internship for free. First, I don't want my business carried by pigeons, for trivial reasons, second, maybe they aren't good enough to create a return of investment and hence get paid. That simple. expecting 23k for 44 hours a week (of which, by British standard, about 25 is made up of tea breaks), is not less indicative of the candidate's own perception of commercial value, although I wouldn't believe statistics from a recruitment agency yuppie ever. The cheaper one is willing to work, the faster they get their commission, so they have a clear motivation of generating such arbitrary statistics.
Experience, as in sheer number of years even if merely spent by attending pointless "meetings" babbling empty phrases in a sequence while drinking tea in a layman's job, is also vastly overrated. I have personally been interviewed by a not less "senior" than "principal" control engineer with 20+ something years of "experience" who did not know what a reduced order observer is, rendering their application prone to noise for the past 2 years (!) claiming that "given a particular sensory architecture, there is no "fancy" maths that could provide any better solution than simple differentiation of sensory output", in response to my in-depth demonstration of how I would engage in improving the noise problem with zero extra cost incurred. That should give a hint about how "different" this was, generations ago, when, "back in the day", unviersities were also obviously totally different, espeically in the 80s something when you graduated (if at all), of course.
HNCs and HNDs are not even comparable to a proper academic training in engineering, yet employers advertise positions by a qualification requirement of a HND, with "degree an advantage". A clear indication of a layman job, at a layman employer.
Being "overqualified" is another typical phenomenon, indicative of another shocking employer side naivity thinking that they can get a HND qualified, lawn mower repair level "engineer" to design non-linear control systems for hovercrafts, or model configurations space dynamics of parallel kinematic chain manipulators - for their 25k, again, of course. Surprise, they can't, and if you still try, well, just have a look at your architecture / construction industry.
To the same end, the UK actually misses out on the BEST graduates, who are now leaving to Germany en masse, including myself.
Good UK universities do not focus on quantity over quality, it is merely an excuse for wanting to pay a gardener's salary, insufficient even to live in at least civilised accommodation, for professional (degree qualified) engineers.
Last, but not least, the UK job market is dominated by useless, totally incompetent, and futile recruitment agencies, fed by impotent UK companies unable to recruit on their own. It should not be a surprise to anyone above the age of 5, if not to corporate management perhaps (sic), however, these agencies are NOT interested to deliver you the best candidates, but to get their (excessive, by far) commission as quick as possible. Of course they simply could not deliver them either, being totally incompetent, often to the extent of being illiterate, writing embarrassing, and sometimes amusing things like "principle engineer" or "lapless domain". As an employer, do you seriously expect these undereducated bottom line yuppie thieves to get you a good enough candidate, by simply ticking boxes on a specification sheet they cannot even read properly?
In response to "Anonymous” of 12 June:
Your article contains many generalities. I do not have a degree. I have an HNC gained in 1973. I did not start work until I was 21, as I was studying a completely unrelated subject and failed to get a degree in it. I started off on the shop floor, not as an apprentice, because I was too old. The firm gave me day release. I thoroughly enjoyed my work and my studying, and as I obtained first of all an ONC and then an HNC, I improved my position in the company and eventually left for a more challenging position. Now, just approaching retirement age, I can look back with gratitude for all the people who helped me and trusted me. I have interviewed many people for engineering jobs, and all the candidates I have selected have been successful. Some have degrees; some like me have ONCs and HNCs. I realise that perhaps in 1973 the standard of education for both degrees and HNCs may have been higher. A good qualification although valuable, does not guarantee success. Attitude, interest, team spirit and determination do. Incidentally, during interviews I have come across candidates with good degrees who could work out the voltage coming out of a potential divider. On the other hand candidates with far lower levels of education could answer the most difficult of questions with ease.