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Qualified Manpower in Engineering

Britain and Other Industrially Advanced Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

S.J. Prals
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Abstract

This article examines the numbers of skilled persons in engineering and allied occupations who qualify each year throughout the skill range—from an engineering doctorate to craftsmen and technicians—and compares Britain with other advanced industrial countries. The main quantitative difference between Britain and other countries lies in the numbers qualifying at the level of qualified craftsman; attention is also drawn to an important qualitative difference in practical content and length of university-degree courses in engineering.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 127 , February 1989 , pp. 76 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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References

(1) Employment Gazette, December 1987, table 1 (p.605) and ‘Concision’, p.810.

(2) J. Blears and B. J. Bonwitt, A Comparison of the Statistics of Engineering Education: Japan and the United Kingdom (Engineering Council, May 1988); Employment Gazette (forthcoming, 1989).

(3) The most convenient introduction to the UK's and other countries' systems of engineering training is in the report of the (Finniston) Committee, Engineering our Future (Cmnd 7994, HMSO, 1980), especially pp. 83,88 and Appendix E; more recent developments are noted here where necessary.

(4) The most recent figures available to me are quoted throughout this paper, even if they do not always relate to precisely the same year.

(5) For the sake of clarity, and curiosity, it should be noticed that this is virtually the reverse of the EG finding in relation to all post-graduate qualification—that Britain produced more than Germany, but fewer than the other three countries!

(6) A helpful survey of employers' and students' views on enhanced degrees, carried out in 1984-6, form the subject of a research report to ESRC by Professor A. Keenan (Herriot-Watt University, Edinburgh) and Dr P. A. Lawrence (Loughborough University of Technology); the views expressed in the text above reflect also my own recent discussions with employers. I have also benefitted from unpublished reports kindly supplied by J. Blears and B. J. Bonwitt of the Research Unit of the Engineering Professors Unit, by Professor J. Douce of the Department of Engineering at the University of Warwick, and by GEC in relation to proposals by their engineering director H. J. H. Wassell. Further research into industry's evaluation of enhanced degrees is clearly needed. Two difficulties in coming to definite conclusions need to be recognised at the outset: first, those on enhanced courses have better initial qualifications (higher A levels), and allowance needs to be made for this in the control sample of those who have taken three-year courses; (b) the comparisons need to be carried out, age by age, after allowing those in three-year courses to spend an extra year in employment (to match the extra year spent on study by those on enhanced courses).

(7) See EG, p. 609 with the reference to Rawle's work, and Finniston, pp.89 and 203f.

(8) Average ages, etc., are from the Federal German education ministry's statistical pocketbook, Grund und Strukturdaten 1987/88, pp. 162, 164 and 214 (for length of course we have quoted the number of Fachsemestem, which exclude an average of about 4 months spent on other studies).

(9) If everyone taking a Doctorate had also previously taken a Master's degree, treble counting would be involved if both were added to first degrees. The figures for ‘levels 6 and 7’ together, as given in the EG, which add together first and subsequent degrees, clearly need to be taken with a pinch of salt. An alternative method of presentation would be to deduct the number attaining a second degree from the number attaining a first degree, to give the estimated net number attaining a first degree and not taking any higher degree.

(10) Based on the DES's estimated total of 16,600 shown in Education Statistics for the UK, including enhanced degrees (as above), less the estimated number of foreign students shown in EG, p.610.

(11) Blears and Bonwit, op. cit., pp. 8-9; they also raise doubts as to whether the EG total includes some who have been double-counted among the 1,900 who have qualified professionally at'private sector institutions' and who may also have attained a degree or diploma.

(12) Architectural qualifications have been excluded here.

(13) See Grund und Strukturdaten, loc.cif.

(14) To avoid double-counting we have not taken into account here the 600 awards of teaching qualifications (Lehramptsprufungen), required for those wishing to teach engineering in vocational schools, since most also have another qualification.

(15) See the recent article by Professor A. W. J. Chisholm, The fundamentals of engineering education and their application in training for advanced manufacturing (Proceedings of Second International Seminar on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Elsevier, 1988); and Finniston, pp.84 and 90. The Engineering Council had recently issued a consultation document on proposals for a generalist engineering course in which ‘any necessary specialisation [is to take] place in first employment rather than in the degree course itself’; this seems contrary to the German approach (see An Integrated Engineering Degree Programme, Engineering Council, London, November 1988, p.2).

(16) This total excludes foreign students and architectural qualifications.

(17) The great difference between British higher technical education and that of the Continent (France, Germany and Sweden) goes back to the nineteenth century, as explained in the valuable monograph by G. Ahlstrom, Engineers and Industrial Growth (Croom Helm, 1982).

(18) NIER, February 1985, November 1987, and further studies in progress.

(19) See EG, p.604 based on ISCED Handbook: United Kingdom (England and Wales), CSR/E/12, Unesco, 1975; similar handbooks for France and the United States are referred to in that publication, p.3, but only that for France has been issued (in 1976, CSR/E/13).

(20) The net figure has been derived on the assumption that a quarter of those attaining Higher Diplomas have previously attained a National Diploma (based on a survey of Diplomates carried out for the Department of Employment, see Employment Gazette, September 1988). It needs to be noted that ISCED includes National Diplomas at Level 3, and hence reaches a lower total for Level 5 than we do here.

(21) Our total for Germany differs considerably from the EG figure of 14,000, which omits Meister. Particularly confused, and confusing, is the Unesco Yearbook (tables 3.13 and 3.14) which showed a total of some 30,000 students at Level 5, but none(!) receiving qualifications. Assuming a two-year course, and allowing for some not completing the course, it seems that EG derived an estimate of 14,000 who qualified. The idiosyncrasies of the German official statisticians in trying to meet Unesco definitions must not divert the reader from the real issues: Meister qualifications are of undoubted industrial importance in Germany and, in our view, cannot be omitted in any realistic comparison of workforce qualifications.

(22) See US Department of Education, Center for Education Statistics, Less-than-4-year Awards in Institutions of Higher Education 1983-85 (1987), and Digest of Education Statistics 1988, 285-8; US Statistical Yearbook 1981, table 287 (and subsequent issues). Regrettably no later figures on ‘non-collegiate’ schools have been found in the sources available to us, nor details of numbers qualifying.

(23) R. Dore and M. Sako, How the Japanese Learn to Work (Routledge, forthcoming).

(24) National institute Economic Review, September 1983, May 1986, February and May 1987, November 1988.

(25) Some points of detail in this calculation may be footnoted. (a) For construction qualifications we have taken the numbers in Britain completing the two-year part-time course known as ‘craft level’; in engineering the corresponding appellation requires a three-year course. A stricter criterion would require us to take the numbers in construction completing the three-year course known as ‘advanced craft’; this would reduce the total by 10,000. (b) We have added a rough allowance of 10 per cent for Scottish technician qualifications. (c) To avoid double-counting between National and Higher qualifications, we have assumed that 90 per cent of those on Higher Certificate courses have completed National Certificate courses (based on discussions with Colleges of Further Education; the survey of the DE, mentioned above, did not provide information on this proportion since it excluded part-time students).

(26) We have here deducted half the total noted above as going on to Meisterqualifications to yield the net number with a craft qualification (the reason for not deducting a greater total is that many going on to Meister qualification have a ‘craft level’ qualification in other fields outside our purview here for example in chemical work or in commercial aspects)