Engineering Island

With a population of little more than 86,000, the Isle of Man has shown exceptional ingenuity in teaching every school child what it really means to be an engineer.

For Dave Waters, chairman of the island’s Engineering Sectors Skills Group (ESSG), it became apparent that the island needed to develop a skills programme to provide replacements for an ageing workforce, and to help grow its engineering sector.

Kids like hearing about things going wrong, they remember that. So we use that in a positive way

Adrian Harrison

Therefore, in 2007, the island’s Manufacturing and Technology Industries (MTI) committee launched the ACE project as a means of imparting engineering knowledge to students as young as 10 years old.

Now, seven years later, every child in every school on the island receives a suite of lessons over the course of six years that are designed to help them understand engineering as a career path, while paving the way for the island’s next generation of engineers.

“The lessons start in year six because children at that age are very receptive,” says engineering sector skills champion Adrian Harrison, who single-handedly delivers every engineering lesson to every school on the island.

“At 10 years old children take in everything, they are like sponges. So we go in before they leave for secondary school.”

The first lesson is designed to spark an interest in engineering, and centres on taking a Sony PlayStation games console apart and understanding how its constituent parts work in unison.

“Using the PlayStation, we teach [the pupils] that it has to be designed, someone needs to think about it, and that somebody has to come up with all these cool ideas about wanting the game to work,” Harrison says.

“But how do you drive all those systems? You need a laser, control systems, cabling et cetera. It gets them to think [that] we are not just talking about people who fix things. The true engineer is someone who designs, tests, does research & development, and there is a maintenance aspect as well.”

The ACE project is structured so that each year the lesson builds up in complexity while exposing the students to different elements of the engineering industry.

Once in secondary school, pupils are shown how a kettle works, and then in year eight - at 12 years old - they learn how to put a directional valve back together.

Perhaps most decisive, however, is the lesson students receive in year nine, the fourth in their suite of six hands-on experiences.

“In year nine we look at a very different element of engineering. We talk to the pupils about communication,” Harrison explains.

“One of the key things I have learned as an engineer in various roles is that communication is the thing that can undo everything. You can have really good processes, people or competencies but it all can get screwed up because of communication,” Harrison says.

“Kids like hearing about things going wrong, they remember that. So we use that in a positive way.”

As a means of instilling the importance of communication in engineering, pupils are divided into groups of two and tasked with building a model aeroplane.

“One person does the building of a Lego aeroplane, and the other instructs from a booklet,” Harrison says.

“The person doing the instructing can’t touch the plane, and the person building can’t read the booklet because they have a blindfold on.

“It’s a good lesson about getting the importance of communication across, and it works very well.”

At this stage of their education, students are taught about the diverse career opportunities within engineering, and they start to consider which STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects they will need to follow engineering through to GSCE-level and beyond to apprenticeships, A-levels and engineering degrees at university.

Once students on the island reach year 10, they are offered work experience, with many gaining places within the engineering firms based on the island.

Overall, companies on the island provide around 70 placements that allow the students to gain real access to a career in engineering.

Unfortunately, the ACE project has proved so successful in recent years that often places are over-subscribed.

“After we had been running the ACE project for a couple of years, we reassessed the situation and found that and one company reported that they had over 200 applications for six places,” says Adrian Moore, manufacturing development manager for the Isle of Man Government.

“We have actually been a victim of our own success.”

However, Harrison and Moore both suggest that in order to combat the issue, the MTI and ESSG are working on getting more companies to offer work experience places and accommodate the increasing wave of interest in engineering.

As a means of boosting engineering uptake further, the ACE project is also closely aligned with various higher education programmes on the island.

“The government has invested £1 million in a new training academy which is being built at the moment,” says Moore.

“It was an old training centre that we had but now it is going to be purely an engineering and manufacturing centre. The first intake [of students] is this September, so it will be open then.”

We have actually been a victim of our own success

Adrian Moore

The main purpose of linking both the ACE project and the training academy together is that when qualified students apply for their first jobs, they will be considered “engineers” from the outset.

“Our intention is that by working directly with government, and directly with the sector, and firms on island, these students will be fully formed engineers,” Moore says.

Possibly the only obvious shortfall of the island’s various skills’ initiatives is its lack of university education – as there are no universities on the Isle of Man.

“It can be [a problem] because, from my point of view, looking at investment and development, what you find is new ideas and spinouts come from universities,” says Moore.

“To get around that, we are aligned with a number of universities across the UK in terms of offering opportunities for spinout companies.”

Similarly, Harrison suggests that the vast majority of students he interacts with have one eye fixed rigidly on going to university, whether in the UK or further afield.

“I try and help them choose what types of courses they should take and explain to them what degree they will need for specific types of engineering,” Harrison says.

However, for Waters, engineering does not necessarily have to be all about going to university.

“More and more the [skills programmes] are about joining up areas of technical capability and where we see a gap, we establish a programme, whether within industry or government, to further fill gaps and ensure we have students with the right skills for the economy,” Waters says.

“The key message I would give, irrespective of the subject matter, is how collaborative we are between the industrial sector and the key government departments.”