CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ENGINEERING
That’s not how it can work
anymore, if ever it really did, he points out.
“You need a lot of 3D modelling to give
the customer the look and feel of the end
product and validate everything will fi t before
we release it for prototyping, and SMEs
need people with the skills to do that; it’s
integrated product design.”
The question that arises, then, is where
such people can be found? Here things
become much more complex. While industry
may be increasingly open to the notion of
the ‘T-shaped’ engineer, and many grow into
‘T-shaped’ through necessity. the education
remains stubbornly predicated on the older,
much more clearly delineated, paradigm in
which different specialisms ‘stay in lane’.
While industry may be in favour of the idea,
when asked whether he
actually believes that
engineering education
has caught up with
that idea yet, Lomas is
succinct: “I wish.”
The problem,
he believes, is that
education is not yet
properly equipped to
meet the demands
of the employment
marketplace. “There’s
no doubt that education is suffering from a
lack of funding, but the other dynamic that’s
also diffi cult is the speed with which it can
change. Our educational system lags far
behind the jobs and roles that our society
demands. New roles are developing faster
than our education system can react. That’s
not a criticism; it’s unfortunately a structural
issue that needs to be addressed.”
Is this something
he feels he can help
address in his role as
IED president? “I’m not
pretending for a minute
that I’m going to make
a massive impact, but
I do hope to make
some difference.
The critical thing
underlying all this is
when you look at the
engineering pipeline.
It starts off quite
promisingly, but
then it gets whittled away and, by the time
we get to graduates looking for jobs, it’s a
very small percentage of the number who
originally started with an interest in their
early school years.
“It’s been recognised that signposting
the varied and exciting opportunities in
engineering is critically important,” he
continues. “Coupled with that, we need
an educational system that develops
young people to be inquisitive, engaged,
collaborative, resilient and suffi ciently
agile, so they can confi dently pivot into new
opportunities as they arise.”
In his role with the Raspberry Pi
Foundation, Lomas has devoted no
small amount of his career to improving
this situation, of course. Much of the
thinking behind the Raspberry Pi was to
make computer science and engineering
accessible and comprehensible to children
through demonstration.
“Keeping the Raspberry Pi without a
case, so that you could see its components,
was as close as we could get to showing
children how it actually worked,” he explains.
“More importantly for me as an engineer
was that you could then attach LEDs and
switches to it and, with a small amount of
code, demonstrate, for example, how a set
of traffi c lights works.”
THE WHEEL DEAL
This model of learning through
demonstration is rooted in his past. “I
was absolutely useless at school – I hated
it,” he recalls. “It wasn’t until I went to
a technical college that things changed.
The thing that did it for me surprisingly
wasn’t electronic, it was a Pelton wheel.
Being face to face with the actual device
and being able to change parameters,
more water, turned those dry equations
into something tangible. This logic may
be carried through to the development of
T-shaped engineers by encouraging the sort
of projects in which they can thrive and by
making them aware of the possibilities. As
he puts it: “We need to give engineers the
opportunity to get involved in all aspects of
a project, and also time to learn and develop
those new skill areas and become that
‘T’ shaped person.”
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