Interview: Enginuity Chair Professor Sir Jim McDonald on solving industry's skills conundrum

Throughout his career, celebrated engineer and educator Professor Sir Jim McDonald has played a key role in helping shape industry’s response to some its biggest and most pressing challenges.  Now, as the new chair of skills charity Enginuity (following a tenure as President of the Royal Academy of Engineering), he’s applying himself to a challenge which is particularly close to his heart: tackling the sector’s soaring demand for skills.

“The whole skills piece is very close to my heart professionally” Sir Jim - who is also Vice Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde - told The Engineer earlier this year. “The longer I travel in my career, the more I realise that fundamentally, the success of any business or any nation is the talent in the nation and in society.”

In recent decades there’s been no shortage of initiatives aimed at addressing this challenge, but whilst many of these efforts have been effective and successful, what’s been missing in McDonald’s view is a cohesive, overarching strategy.  “We’ve got lots of very active, high quality professional engineering organisations, but what we’ve lacked is coherence and collaboration and as a consequence the skills space has become quite noisy,” he explained. “It seems to me there’s a degree of a discontinuity and lack of coherent strategy in the skills domain. And that’s not because anyone’s doing anything wrong. It’s just that we’re not doing enough right together. I think what has been missing is a vision for the engineering profession.” 

 The key to solving this, he believes, is the application of the systems engineering principles of which he’s been such a vocal and passionate champion throughout his career.

In a 2022 interview with The Engineer focused on the challenges of decarbonisation Sir Jim  spoke passionately about the need for a joined-up strategy to net zero and the importance of applying a  systems engineering mindset. And a similar holistic approach will be key, he believes, to cutting through the thorny and tangled complexity of issues which conspire to make skills such an enduring challenge for the sector. 

“Engineering skills requirements can only really be properly understood and addressed if they’re recognised as part of an overarching system, he said. “We need to combine the pipeline of skills, industry and policy much more tightly”. And it’s a challenge in which he believes Enginuity has an important role to play.  “It seems to me that much of what is missing is some of that collaboration glue that connects the main partners together, and I believe Enginuity is well-placed to play a role driving the kind of deep commitment to collaboration that’s required.”

For McDonald, the emphasis now is on developing these important collaborative relationships with some urgency. “Over the first six months or so of my tenure as chair, I need to get out and speak to those partners in the ecosystem. I need to be speaking to fellow training providers. I want to be speaking to policymakers. I want to be speaking to people in the UK government and in the devolved governments and I want to be speaking to business and industry representatives. We can’t wait until we have a perfect strategy, we have to get mobilised, and we can learn by doing” he said. 

McDonald is hopeful that the arrival of a new government can help energise this process, and is particularly encouraged in this regard by its establishment of Skills England, a new arms-length body bringing together key partners to meet the skills needs of the next decade. “I roundly welcome the establishment of Skills England,” he said. “I think that offers the ability to get a national focus, which will bring together employers, business and industry across sectors, skills providers, educators and trainers.”

He also welcomes the emergence of a new industrial strategy (the UK’s first since 2021),  along with the establishment of the Industrial Strategy Council and a government pledge to collaborate with industry on the development of this strategy: “I think this promises that converging function where business, industry, academia, training and skills providers and the government agencies and the government departments really get about having a vision for what the UK is going to a be about.”

Industry’s skills challenge isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but in recent years it’s been given added bite by the rapid evolution of a host of digital technologies.  With that in mind McDonald believes the need for a strategic focus on the skills of the future has never been more important. He pointed to the Royal Academy of Engineering led “Engineers 2030” project,  which is examining how industry, educators and policymakers can work together to deliver the skills of the future, as an important initiative in this regard.

At the same time, Sir Jim stressed that it’s also important not to forget some of the more traditional disciplines, which remain key to the UK’s industrial strength: “We must absolutely embrace the fact that the conventional engineering capabilities around craft skills, around welding, around toolmaking and the likes, are fundamentally still required,” he said.

It’s also particularly important, McDonald added, that the challenges faced by the SME community are well understood, and that this vital segment of the engineering and manufacturing economy is listened to and supported : “Sometimes, depending on where you are as a small company, making the payroll is the focus, and it’s hard to see what a two or three year horizon looks like. Yet the hiring of half a dozen people in a small organisation can have a massive impact on their productivity, on their ability to deliver and consequently their growth.”

 Against this backdrop of spiraling skills requirements, McDonald is concerned by continuing reports that young engineers are being lured away from the sector into more financially lucrative areas of the economy and he believes industry should be doing a better job of selling a career in engineering: “One of the founding charitable purposes of Enginuity is that engineers can change the world if you give them  the opportunity to do so and it’s incumbent upon us as a profession to escalate the role of engineers and articulate it much better than we do. We need to really frame an engineering career as something that’s exciting, well rewarded for a lifetime, and that makes a difference to society.”

Despite the challenges ahead, McDonald is fundamentally optimistic about the next generation of engineers, and their appetite to use their skills to make the world a better place: “I’ve got the delight of having 25,000 students in my campus, and the social awareness and conscience and desire to have an impact in society that I see in our engineers these days is so much more advanced than it was when I was at that stage as a young engineer.”

And for those who have been tempted away by the relative riches of a career in a city, the door is always open: “ If really smart engineers that have done a college qualification or a degree are  offered an eye watering salary, then all we can say is good luck, but do come back to the profession when you’re ready to do something that’s really going to change the world.”