The Trainee Engineer of the Future

What do they look like?

The world evolves, engineers evolve to meet the demands, engineers catalyse the next round of evolution. This is the inexhaustible cycle of development that we as Engineers are part of. I believe our role as engineers involves training the next generation of engineers and that in turn means thinking about what the next generation of engineers needs to master as the world evolves around and because of them.

What skills will they need..?

Multidisciplinary Systems: Systems are becoming more complex and more integrated, requiring engineers to understand more than one discipline and how they fit together. The Engineer of the Future will need to have depth of knowledge in one core area and a breadth of knowledge to a more than purely introductory level across several. Engineers will therefore need to study multiple disciplines during training.

Demand: HND or above level qualification to provide the depth but with greater emphasis on other disciplines and how interact. Syllabuses will change to accommodate this approach and I would not be surprised if more combined degrees appear such as “electrical and mechanical engineering” and a return of the ‘electrical and electronic engineering’ degrees which have fallen out of favour in recent years.

Interdisciplinary Applications: Solutions are increasingly demonstrating an intersection of different technical fields which traditionally have been fairly well removed – energy used to be the domain of electrical engineers with mechanical support but solar and hydrogen bring chemistry (rather than chemical engineering) to the forefront along with materials science.

Demand: Trainee engineers will be draw from science backgrounds rather than just pure-play engineering as has traditionally been the case. Science will become more central to the foundational training of engineers to allow them to work more effectively in interdisciplinary environments.

Systems Engineering: The rise in Multi- and Inter- disciplinary approaches will necessitate the use of systems engineering in a more structured and fundamental way. The Trainee Engineer of the future will need to have the systems engineering tools as part of the toolkit from day one and be fluent in their application. Multi- and Inter- disciplinary environments all lend themselves to more exploratory working and the use of Agile methods. Agile will likely become part of the normal toolkit for Engineers.

Demand: Educational training will include systems engineering and Agile as part of the base syllabus.

Note: I suspect this will also lead to an increase in mathematical content of degrees, probably more in line with the field of operational research and model building than the more abstract, to enable engineers to build comprehensive models and know what the crunch points are.

Building this foundation of competence will require the use of project-based learning (using “training” projects to teach material rather than just lectures) to build the right behaviours and outlook as at the same time. I think this needs to be distinct from the way we train apprentices – the pitfall of on the job training is that people learn the behaviours they see around them rather than what they should be doing. I believe we should bring projects into the classroom rather than expose people too early to the suboptimal behaviours we see in the real world. Part of this will be a greater exposure to VR/AR and project delivery techniques to draw out the benefits these technologies and methodologies offer to embed these insights into engineers as the emerge into industry to better enable them to question and challenge.

This emphasis on training rather than studying means we shift emphasis from being students to trainees (hence the title). We should think of the next generation as Engineers in Training or Trainee Engineers rather than students and treat them accordingly.