Britain will face a shortage of engineers, scientists and mathematicians...

I graduated with a Maths degree in 2014 and honestly that didn't lead to anything. I'm in a completely unrelated field. Why would people study hard in Engineering or other STEM fields and later find out that they are under paid and under appreciated

yeah but its like EVERY. SINGLE. UNIVERSITY. wants AAA or higher insanity tbh

I guess it depends on the type of engineering for example mechanical engineering or chemical engineering will have higher requirements than motorsports engineering - which could be because of competition as well

THIS ^ is part of the issue!

The lack of education into alternative methods of progression from school. The current school system (in Scotland atleast) seems entirely tuned into getting kids into uni. Hell if your not doing UCAS stuff around christmas then in my experience you where mostly ignored by teachers, which is absolutely retarded. There are so many students leaving school with bad GCSEs (or equiv) and no A levels and they end up being completely lost unless they do their own research.

I cant comment for other STEM subjects but for engineering you can progress to a degree with essentially zero school grades if you wish and in not much longer than it would take to get into uni, I will list an example:

College route to b-eng(hons)
1. NC X engineering (SQFlvl5 you can enter with essentially zero prerequisites)
2. NQ X engineering (SQFlvl6 requring a couple of OK GCSEs or NC)
3. HNC X engineering (SQFlvl7 requring decent GCSEs and a coulple of OK A levels OR NQ equiv of uni year 1)
4. HND X engineering (SQFlvl8 requring good a levels (AAB, ABB etc) OR HNC)
5. 3rd year deferred entry to X Engineering B-eng (requiring HND, or possibly HNC for 2nd year entry, not all unis offer this but many good ones do, in my area Strathclyde, Caledonian and UWS(ok good-ish ) all offer this for both mechanical and electrical fields)
6. Honours, you advance to this like any other degree student

So to go from NOTHING from school to your full degree its 6 years, and the other advantage is you can drop out once you reach the level you want to be at. Also for students who fall JUST short of their uni reqs you can go in at HNC level and advance in 4 years like any other degree student. The fact that schools dont educate kids to alternative routes boggles the mind.

There is also apprenticeships which offer the equivalent of NQ or NC at the end of them. We need to seriously distance ourselves from this "If you fail in school your flipping burgers for life" mindset that has indented itself into our education system if we want to put foward our home grown engineers rather than relying on immigrant labour.

Oh thats not what i expected!
Why were the requirements so low for engineering back then?

THIS IS AMAZING OMG
this is why im taking a gap year x'D to research all mah alternative routes :O

Haha I took a gap 5years! did an apprenticeship as a vehicle technician, worked as a recovery driver, and then worked in a supermarket before finally deciding to try my luck at schooling again (I only got a BC in my Scottish highers, a level equivs)

what yeh work as now

Western policy since WWII

Unfortunately, this leaves 'source' countries with a brain drain, which locks them into poverty

We need a professionals who are interested in contributing to their fields and making exceptional progress in their fields for the benefit of their field and wider society.

The problem isn't that it doesn't pay but the repulsive narrative that we are currently being exposed to which is that "Money is everything".


For the first couple of years, you may find that money does motivate you but then your job simply becomes about picking up a paycheck.

If you want a short-term solution where people only come and enter professional fields for monetary reward without any passion or desire for it, then yes, offering them huge salaries will work but it will come to corrupt the integrity and standards that have been built over the years.

I fly helicopters.


Interestingly, my last employer was working hard on outsourcing engineering to India (I could be cynical about the relative rates of pay...) but in all honesty it didn't work too well. I suspect there were cultural issues as they were all educated to at least degree level and had been working in the job longer than I had, but independent thought was rare and very precise instructions had to be given to get usable work back.


What a load of crap. To get an entry level graduate engineering job you have to put in three or four years of hard study at university, and are rewarded with a job that pays only marginally better than you can do with a couple of GCSEs. When I left university I worked temporarily in a factory for £10 an hour (and as I was a temp I was on a reduced rate). A couple of years later (I had a very brief career elsewhere!) I started work at one of the largest engineering companies in the UK, on about £11.80 an hour - and the overtime was unpaid, unlike time and a half in the factory! In terms of absolute pay I earned more when I was farming, admittedly working long hours but at rates close to what I got as an engineer. Poor reward for four years of study and exams, and moving to a part of the country I didn't really want to be in.

Graduate engineering work also tends to be a lot of donkey work, you're certainly not going to set the world on fire - particularly at larger companies.

Offering fair remuneration for a lot of training and responsibility isn't going to lead to wholesale corruption. When the work offered is relatively dull, progression is slow and pay is poor then you'll get good engineers - like myself - walking away from the industry for better pay or more exciting jobs. No amount of whinging from industry is going to change that, nor is telling people they should do it for the good of society.

No, but we could train them and then reap the benefits come a few years down the line. A lot of them are educated to highschool level so their maths and science is up to par if not better than GCSE level.

how does one get into flying helicopters...

Data science is just a buzzword for data analysis so it's not necessarily anymore enticing than engineering to the average Joe. And most people doing animations or apps don't do maths or physics so that point is invalid.

I was quoting that from the article because of the bit where it said that people think that maths and physics only leads to things like teaching. Data science or data analysis, it's still another job that you can get out of it. It's not about whether it's enticing or not; that point in the article was about misconceptions of where maths and physics can lead you. So yeah, the point is valid, and completely flew over your head.