Student capture and storage
25 May 2012
The UK is training just over a third of the 30,000 new graduates needed to bridge the skills gap in the engineering sector each year, the IMechE estimates. Of equal concern are the figures showing that around 40% of these graduates do not end up working in the engineering professions.
This is poor reward for the many industry associations and individual companies that invest significant resources to promote engineering to kids, parents and teachers, and guide young people to careers in related industry sectors.
That these efforts, at least, are paying off can be seen in the latest UCAS data showing a 12% rise in applications for chemical engineering degree courses - despite the hike in tuition fees, which has reduced applications for many other courses.
However, the battle for the hearts and minds does not end when young people sign up to study engineering. With their number-crunching skills and positive work ethic, engineering students are prime targets for poaching by other sectors - as evidenced by the prominence of companies from the financial sector at various careers events.
One way industry and academia can fight back is by investing in state-of-the-art equipment and facilities that enrich the experience offered to engineering students - part of the thinking behind Imperial College London’s new carbon capture pilot plant, which it recently opened in collaboration with ABB.
Among other features, the pilot plant houses an impressive array of control and automation facilities. These equip ICL’s chemical engineering students to operate, control and supervise operations, either via mobile devices or in a control room equipped with advanced remote monitoring facilities.
The challenge for the engineering industries and universities is to place a value on making this sort of hands-on, high-tech experience more widely available to engineering students across the UK.
These facilities don’t come cheap: the carbon capture facility at ICL was established at a cost of around £2 million, about half of which was provided by ABB. But the payback in terms of keeping the best talent within the UK engineering sector, could well be much greater.
