Engineering skills should go beyond the task

By Richard Braddell

"People are our greatest resource" has become a commercial platitude.

But whether manufacturers believe it or not, they still have reason to question whether they are getting employees with the right education and skills.

Industry training at the trade level offers contrasting experiences. Since the traditional apprenticeships were replaced by industry training organisations (ITOs) early this decade, some industries previously not well catered for have profited.

Plastics, formerly with no trade training structure, is frequently cited as one of the industries that developed an effective ITO, and groups such as the Landfill Association are putting in place training units that will give employees qualifications that didn't exist before.

Peter Rasmussen of the Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association considers the ITO framework to be "3000 per cent better".

But he worries that some of the traditional apprenticeship areas, such as engineering, have failed to adapt, largely because the mutual long-term commitment between employer and apprentice has been lost.

Mr Rasmussen says the position in engineering is complicated by the wide variety of skills -- toolmaking, fitting and turning and foundry work -- that fall under that banner.

But it is all the more difficult because engineering businesses are reluctant to enter training arrangements given the high administration burden, the need to institute internal assessment procedures and the time taken on courses that are not always relevant.

Having made the commitment, there is no guarantee that a trainee will not just walk away to another employer offering more money once the shackles of apprenticeship indenture have gone.

The problem would appear to go deeper due to a collapse in formal training facilities. With engineering trainee numbers more than halving over the past three years, the Auckland Institute of Technology has axed a third of its engineering-related staff, while some other polytechs have closed courses altogether.

When it comes to the supply and standard of professional graduates, manufacturers mostly seem content. They may think New Zealand is producing too many lawyers and accountants, but they also seem satisfied with the supply of professionally qualified graduates in areas such as engineering, even if the worldwide demand for Y2K remediation has stretched the supply of electronic and information technology staff.

If they do fret over anything, it is that engineering and technical graduates have too narrow a view of the skills they should bring to the job.

Engineers are the conduit through which science reaches industry, observes the qualifications manager at the Institution of Professional Engineers, Virginia Burton.

But while the engineering profession unquestionably is delivering on this in a technical sense, in the current environment graduates also need to be aware of related marketing, legal and financial management issues as well.

The reason lies in the small size of most New Zealand businesses and the jack-of-all-trades mentality that engenders. Most manufacturers fit into the small-to-medium-sized-enterprise (SME) category and cannot afford the rigid specialisation of the large firms.

The point is underscored by Peter White-Robinson, managing director of New Plymouth-based Fitzroy Engineering, a 500-staff business whose design, sheetmetal and heavy engineering divisions service the oil, dairy and pulp industries, among others.

Fitzroy has around 50 graduates on its staff, but Mr White-Robinson says it is disappointing to find graduates need as much as three years on-the-job experience before they are truly effective.

"New graduates with us really struggle -- they are just out of their depth," he says. "Professional staff need commercial and life skills, but to my mind they come with some very black-and-white ideas and I think they lack in the way they present and negotiate. It needn't just be in projects; it can be in the need to negotiate salary."

Nevertheless, a broad skill set does not suit everybody. Fisher & Paykel is one of those technologically driven companies of sufficient size to care little whether its engineers have wider skills.

According to the general manager (electronics and human
resources) of its laundry division, Brian Nowell, it likes the specialisation provided by engineering graduates from Auckland and Canterbury, and most of its intake comes from those campuses.

Mr Nowell says those engineering graduates who are going to make their mark will do so regardless of their training.

"Finding these people has always been difficult, but when you've got one, it stands out like pimples on a pig's back."