Nicolas Smith: Top engineers need more than No 8 wire mentality

It's the application of the creative solutions graduates come up with in their careers that will make the difference and drive our economy. Photo / Thinkstock

I agree with Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce that we need more engineering graduates, but here at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Auckland we have more graduates walking through our doors than ever.

So it isn't just about numbers, it's about the type of graduates we need for today's - and tomorrow's - world.

I believe the engineering ethos is embedded in our culture. It's the old No8 wire mentality, the ability to think independently and creatively to develop and apply technologies to the task at hand. We are immensely good at that. However, even more important is to teach our students how to ask the important questions that transform the way we see challenges, opportunities and ultimately our world. It is this ability more than anything that underpins innovation, anticipates needs and provides solutions to drive economic growth not just today, but for the next 40 years.

We also need to teach skills that were once deemed the sole preserve of the humanities. Skills such as teamwork, communication and stakeholder engagement are vital in today's world. By asking students to incorporate a communications plan, for example, into an engineering exercise, students gain an understanding of how public engagement might work in the real world.

Similarly, Mr Joyce says we need more IT graduates when what we really need are graduates for whom IT is just one core skill. Our graduates in electrical, civil, mechanical and chemical engineering use computing as a matter of course - it's the application of the creative solutions they come up with in their careers that will make the difference and drive our economy.

Engineering education has changed substantially since I was an undergraduate in the 1990s. One of those changes has been the development of courses with a strong cross-disciplinary focus so that the Faculty of Engineering is helping develop new healthcare technologies by working with the Faculty of Science, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences and the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and involving clinicians, district health boards and local and international companies.

Students are exposed to cutting edge developments in robotics, mechatronics and sensing technologies. Specific projects include the development by Associate Professor Bruce MacDonald from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of "healthbots", which can be used by people at home to remind them when to take medications or to call for help. In mechatronics, new technologies are being developed to aid people with impaired mobility. In the Department of Engineering Science, Associate Professor Andrew Mason is involved in developing ambulance simulation software, helping ambulance services deploy resources as efficiently as possible.

I also agree with the minister on the importance of industry links, and I believe our relationship with industry has never been better. All our departments have advisory boards with representatives from major corporates including Orion, Fonterra, Beca, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Opus, and these companies talk to us about industry graduate needs and research capacity. Recently we initiated a trial with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare to help us assess course content for their business. That has been successful and will be rolled out to other companies.

For our students there are a variety of workplace experiences on offer from our largest companies. We encourage them to take up every opportunity and require that they spend 800 hours working within professional engineering companies.

New technology is providing us with enormous power to do fantastic things and harnessing that power is the challenge at the core of engineering.

At the University of Auckland's Faculty of Engineering we are focused on meeting that challenge for the benefit of the country as a whole.

* Professor Nicolas Smith is dean of engineering at the University of Auckland.