Outgoing Engineers Australia CEO Bronwyn Evans discusses the challenges and opportunities faced by engineering down under and how a fresh approach to public outreach could help.
Her journey into engineering wasn’t a particularly romantic one – it wasn’t exactly a calling that she felt compelled to answer. “I was a pragmatic teenager,” Evans told The Brilliant. “I was good at physics, maths and chemistry and wanted to earn a decent living.”
As it happens, engineering turned out to be an immensely gratifying career path and Evans worked her way up the ranks to become CEO of Engineers Australia in 2019. The organisation seeks to serve and improve the practice of engineering throughout Australia.
Evans retired on May 6th and looking back on her tenure, she says engineers need to be better at communicating the value, passion and creativity of their work, so that today’s teenagers are more excited than she was to consider a future in engineering.
“We all get that doctors do amazing things and save lives. We all understand what lawyers do, but engineers and the good they do for society tends to be too much in the background of peoples’ minds,” she says. “There simply isn’t as good an understanding of engineering and as a result, I think there’s a tendency to guide children away from engineering.”
That’s a serious problem for Australia – a recent report from Engineers Australia highlighted the dwindling number of students needed to sure up Australia’s engineering workforce. The report showed that roughly 12% of boys were studying advanced maths in year 12, compared with 6% of girls.
“Every four-year-old is an engineer. You just have to look at them play,” says Evans. “So, there’s a disconnect somewhere.”
Combating Australia’s skills shortage
The effects of this glut in the skills pipeline are already being felt. The Engineers Australia report found that close to 60% of qualified engineers across the country were born overseas, compared with 30% of the general population coming from abroad.
While immigration is an effective way to plug skills shortages, it’s also important that Australia bolsters its own skills pipeline to ensure that its engineering workforce remains intact should unforeseen circumstances – such as the COVID-19 pandemic – restrict access to foreign labour markets.
Part of the answer, says Evans, is for engineers to be better communicators. “Engineers are creative problem-solvers who can take on almost anything and come up with new designs and new ways of working,” she says.
If more young people understood how rewarding the profession can be, they might be more inclined to stick with the required maths and science programmes. “Engineers have a bad rep for being poor communicators. It’s a joke than an extroverted engineer looks at your shoelaces instead of their own,” she laughs. “But it does our profession a disservice, we don’t know how to talk to the outsider and too often dismiss anyone who isn’t technical. That needs to change.”
That’s why Engineers Australia has been encouraging its more than 100,000 members to go into schools and give talks, explaining what engineering is and why it’s a career path worth pursuing.
“There’s a lot more to do in terms of getting more girls and women involved too,” says Evans. “I was at Monash University recently and I looked out into the audience and about 25-30% were women.” While that might sound like a daunting statistic to address, Evans is optimistic. “I did my degree 40 years ago and we were probably at 3% [women],” she says. “I’m hopeful we’ll get there.”
For now, though, just 12% of engineers in Australia are women, according to another report from Engineers Australia. The United States is in a similar position, according to the U.S. census, with 15%. Australia and the U.S. lag far behind Europe, where approximately 35% of engineers are women, and Iran, where more than half of the engineering workforce are women.
The importance of a positive work environment
Part of the solution is ensuring that female engineers want to stay in the profession.
According to a survey of more than 5,000 women across 10 countries carried out by Deloitte, 23% are actively thinking about quitting their jobs in the wake of the pandemic. Problems with their workplace culture was the number one factor cited as a reason for those who are thinking of leaving.
Evans says she was keenly aware of how crucial a positive work environment is when she led Engineers Australia. “I’ve been thinking about my legacy. There’s a team of more than 300 at Engineers Australia and I’d like to think I created a workplace culture that’s inclusive,” she says.
While a CEO does help to set the tone of their organisation, Evans doesn’t think a positive work environment is something that can be realistically be achieved with a top-down, heavy-handed approach. When she took on the role of CEO, she spent time understanding the governance structures of Engineers Australia and working with the board. That way she had the backing of the wider organisation and its executive body, rather than trying to rule by decree.
“I wanted to work closely with the board,” she says. “But I was also clear that I wanted a workplace with an inclusive culture.”
That’s the better approach, she says. “The time of the heroic CEO is gone. It’s a flawed model,” she says. “It’s about getting out there and talking to people and just being human.”
Article by Benjamin Plackett
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