Inventor Dyson Launches Institute to Bridge Engineering Gap
Chuck Heschmeyer | January 12, 2017British inventor and industrial designer James Dyson, perhaps most famous for a vacuum cleaner, has launched a university to help bridge the UK’s engineering skills gap. Dyson said he’ll invest £15 million, or more than $12 million, over the next five years in the Dyson Institute of Technology to help his company and the UK meet growing demand for engineers.
James DysonThe school’s bachelor of engineering degree program is being offered in conjunction with the University of Warwick and will be tuition-free to qualifying students. Moreover, students will get a salaried job at Dyson working with the company’s new product development team as they work towards their degree. The company employs approximately 3,000 engineers and scientists.
The new institute will be housed on the Dyson campus in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and will enroll its first class of 25 students beginning in September. Most classes will be held at Dyson with teaching done by both University of Warwick professors and company engineers.
In an article in the online edition of The Guardian newsletter, Dyson lamented the engineering skills gap in the West and said the UK alone needs 10 times as many engineers as it did 10 years ago. “We are competing globally with Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore,” said Dyson in the article. “It’s all the major technology nations and we have got to be better than them.”
The engineer shortage is a “problem in America and Europe and has started to become a problem in Japan,” he says. “It seems that the fast-growing economies or emerging nations really recognize the value of engineering, but when you reach security there is less interest in what makes you successful.”
Graduates of the new four-year degree program can expect to receive a technical graduate engineering role at Dyson, the institute says.
I've always had a great deal of respect for James Dyson but have read a fair few articles where he has appeared to whinge at the government for not allowing enough engineers from outside the UK to come in and solve his recruitment problems.
I've suggested in comments to these articles that sponsoring good engineering students using bursaries and training schemes would be the better solution (for the UK) rather than taking the quick and easy option of external recruitment.
Now my respect for James Dyson as an engineer (i.e. an innovative problem solver) has increased because I can see that he is tackling the true cause of the skills shortage - the failure of successive governments to tailor education funding to the needs of the nation.
I hope that he can influence the UK government thinking on its education policies and that, the example Sir James has set will be taken up by other UK companies.
As a member of my wifes family works for Dyson I might be seen as biased, but I hope this works out, the UK is desperately short of capable practical 'engineers', for too long anything hands-on has been seen as 'blue-collar' work.
In my direct experience most 'graduates' have no hands-on experience and little understanding, the best illustration was a new 'graduate engineer' turning up at the tool-room in an IBM manufacturing plant with CAD drawings for new devices prototype bent sheet metal case-ware, with a dimensional tolerance of 0.01 microns. When we finally finished laughing we asked how he thought we could make it to such accuracy? His answer, well the CAD package said you could!