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Elanor Huntington: Building and reshaping tomorrow’s engineering workforce

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The coronavirus has left millions of Australians – such as new graduates and those in insecure employment – with precarious career prospects. Job-seekers face an uphill battle finding work in an economic downturn tipped to continue even after the pandemic subsides.

Professor Elanor Huntington knows how they feel. When she graduated with a degree in physics in the mid-1990s, she was thrust into a job market still reeling from the stock market crash of the late 1980s.

Now Dean of Engineering at the Australian National University (ANU), Huntington is one of the most influential and visionary engineering educators in Australia. She is giving workers the tools to harness new technology to their advantage, especially in a post-COVID-19 world. And her latest project is her most ambitious – to shape a future where engineering and computing is no longer about creating things for us, but creating the systems that will become us.  

Early lessons

Huntington was taught to code as a youngster by her mother, who created her own tertiary education opportunities after they were initially cruelled in the face of high fees and her parents’ choice between educating a son or a daughter. With both her father and grandfather as engineers, Huntington was encouraged to pursue her own education ambitions, but her mother’s story of determination left a clear mark.

It’s part of the reason Huntington is driven to ensure all Australians will benefit from what she describes as “one of the most profound, transformative periods in the interaction between technology and society”.

Because even though labour market research has estimated a quarter to nearly half of Australian jobs could be automated in the coming decade, the opportunities created in the process will make up for those losses – and then some.

Creating the eco-system to help people navigate opportunities in tech

A concern for Huntington is those who may not have the knowledge to best navigate their career – and make the right decisions – through this transition. With technological advancements moving so swiftly, people feel redundant or left behind, and suffer undue stress as a result.

But this doesn’t have to be the case.

“If you are a welder, the rhetoric is that robots will replace you. But in fact, with a bit of training, you have the potential to set yourself up for the next 30 years of your career,” Huntington says.

“Even if the next generation of welding is completely done by robots, we will still need humans who will look at the software that sits inside the robots.”

And not just any coders. We will need coders who understand welding. “So when a robot cracks and starts doing bad welding, you have the understanding of how welding actually occurs so you can fix it.”

Huntington compares this transition to that of mechanics 10 years ago, back when the job mostly involved sliding on a trolley under a car. Today, it’s largely computation.

Welding is just one example, and while this kind of training will likely be provided by the vocational education sector rather than universities, the more significant issue Huntington is trying to resolve is that industry doesn’t know who to talk to about building a future workforce.

“We need to create a really clear line of communication between industry, universities, TAFE and schools about skills.  Jobs are changing really quickly; so quickly that it’s becoming intellectually challenging and emotionally unsettling to frame the conversation on that basis.  We may not know exactly the jobs, but the skills needed to thrive in the future are much more clear. Each sector then needs to say ‘OK, I will do this piece of the training’ because with the rate of technological change, we will need to regularly upskill.”

So over the past three years, she has spoken with large and small employers, employees, industry groups, school-teacher and parents to build an eco-system around the skills that need people may need over their lifetime.

And what does the eco-system look like? According to Huntington  “it needs to look a bit like the map of the London Underground.  People can start anywhere and end anywhere and they can move along their life journey on a particular track. 

Say for example you start off really wanting to be a doctor, but then at some point you want to supplement your training with some coding because you want to understand how pacemakers work.  We need to create the kind of ecosystem to support that.”

The skills gap driven by gender perceptions

“A senior executive from a bank sits on one of my advisory boards and he needs to hire something like 1500 data scientists,” she says. “But there aren’t enough in Australia. It’s not a matter of going off-shore because it’s cheap – we just don’t have the skills here.”

And where there are skill gaps, graduate demand quickly overwhelms the education sector.

Training more people to fill those jobs isn’t that simple. Education needs educators, and perceptions play a big role in who makes it through the pipeline. “Engineering and IT have long been seen as male fields, and this turns off women, so the balance of potential graduates is not optimised,” Huntington says.

“The flow-on effect is that because data scientists are in such high demand, and we don’t have enough women applying, industry is sucking them out of universities with promises of lots of very interesting problems and a bag of money. They haven’t left enough experts in universities to allow us to educate them at scale.”

Looking at the broader landscape, Huntington sees another education mismatch. Australian universities produce three times as many scientists as can find employment, but only half the engineers we need.

The participation rate of young people taking courses in school that lead to engineering at university is less than 10% and dropping. And the proportion of female engineers in Australia is still stubbornly stuck below 20%, Huntington adds.

There are a quarter of a million engineers in Australia and fewer than 1,000 of them are women over the age of 50.”

To boost numbers of women in engineering, she created a series of qualifications offered at ANU which enrol at least 40% women. She also launched Re-imagine, an ambitious project that reconfigures engineering and computing education to prepare for the world in 2050.

By then, people with engineering and computing skills will have helped mitigate and navigate climate change, improve sustainability, manage mass urbanisation and ageing populations and harness the benefits of implantable technologies, Huntington says.

“Civil engineers gave us clean water and the roads and bridges. Mechanical engineers gave us the boats, trains and cars. Aeronautical engineers gave us planes. Electrical engineers gave us safe, clean, cheap energy and electronic engineering followed by computing, and brought the world to us through television and then the internet.”

Recent advancements in the Internet of Things, social media and artificial intelligence signals to Huntington that the next engineering discipline is soon to be born. “And this one, because it’s about how connected we are to each other and to things, is actually going to have us inside the machine. Now that’s really profound.”

Her clarion call is clear.

We bring together people, technology and society, but we need to do a whole lot better at explaining what it is we do so we can attract more people from a diverse range of backgrounds.

Engineers are the people who balance technological opportunity with technological risk – and we’re needed now more than ever.”

Follow the Elanor Huntington on Twitter | LinkedIn

 


Article by Kylie Ahern

Image credit: Mathew Lynn | Fairfax Media

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