Prof Euan Lindsay is Director of Charles Sturt University’s Engineering Foundation. He talked to InTouch about CSU’s student engineers’ successes since courses began at CSU, their career prospects, constraints on the engineering profession, and the potential for regional Australia to thrive with better infrastructure investment when cities become overcrowded.
InTouch: When did you know you wanted an engineering career? What has been the highlight so far? Euan Lindsay: It was at a school careers night in year 10 where it was essentially presented as an option for kids who were good at maths and science. I've since learned that engineering is so much more, but at the time I kind of defaulted into it.
The highlight so far has been establishing CSU Engineering. Very few people get the opportunity to work to a blank page, and to build something truly transformational. Being in an environment where the question was, ‘is it innovative enough? rather than ‘is that too much change?’ is an amazing opportunity, and I'm very proud of how I've been able to weave together the contributions of my amazing colleagues to build a really innovative engineering degree at CSU.
IT: Are any unexpected influences currently affecting engineering education and training? How? EL: I don't know if it is unexpected, but there is a significant amount of inertia in what we do. Engineering education practice is dominated by what is ultimately outdated best practice. There are very good reasons for how we got to our current models, and they were absolutely the right answer for their time, and to be honest, they actually work fairly well, but they are incredibly complicated interacting systems and so it is very hard to get all of the pieces lined up simultaneously to actually implement major change.
People are open to change; but when you have a system that's taken decades to build, and when people's lives depend on the ultimate products of that system, people become very conservative in how they go about making improvements.
IT: What is the current 'professional engineering identity'? How has it changed over time? EL: I think we're seeing an emergence of leadership and creativity as explicit features of the engineering identity. They've always been there implicitly – good design requires you be creative, and good problem definition requires leadership to engage with all the stakeholders, but the ‘Engineer as Technocrat’ archetype was dominant for a while, and now we're seeing these other implicit parts of our nature being addressed and celebrated more explicitly.
IT: What attracts students to study engineering at CSU? What have been some milestones for the university and students since the course's inception in 2016?
EL: The chance to be a student engineer rather than an engineering student. The authenticity of working as a professional-in-training, and then actually working as a cadet embedded in industry, is a powerful opportunity to learn engineering the way you're going to practice it – and to improve people's lives through your work while you're still studying is very attractive.
The milestones have been having a team of student engineers declared Grand Champions of the Engineers Without Borders Challenge in 2016 in our first year of operation; being identified as one of four case studies of global best practice in an MIT-commissioned benchmarking study in 2018; placing every one of our cadet engineers in industry; directly addressing the shortage of civil engineers in regional NSW; having two of our cadets appointed to positions that were advertised for graduate engineers, and being chosen in preference to other people's graduates.
But more importantly: the way that the work our cadet engineers do on placement is improving people's lives. It has ranged from community-scale impacts like cleaner water for regional towns, or mitigating contaminated worksites, through to personal-scale impacts like a timely and affordable design for a house slab.
IT: How are CSU student interests balanced between community service vs industry? EL: What has perhaps been most impressive is that many of our students have integrated them rather than balancing them. Community service and industry aren't necessarily at odds with each other; and instilling a human-centred design philosophy has meant that our cadets in private industry can still maintain a community perspective and vice versa.
IT: What circumstances created the current shortage of engineers in Australia? EL: A range of factors contributed to the shortage, and I think it is important to understand that it isn't a single monolithic shortage. Much of the problem is a mismatch between the discipline and location of work with the available engineering workforce. There are parts of Australia crying out for qualified engineers, and graduates complaining that they can't get jobs; and when you unpack the constraints on both supply and demand it is understandable why they can't match up.
Overall, I think we repel too many people from our profession. We historically haven't been good at presenting the full range of what engineering is and what it can be, and so when we allow a stereotype to develop it makes it harder to attract people who don't match that stereotype. It's somewhat of a tightrope to become an experienced engineer and the earliest choices on that path are made when you're still at primary school, so we've got a delicate balance to keep people on track to become engineers, and the crosswinds have been increasing.
The other big challenge is that the engineering skillset is valuable, and so we continually find good engineers leaving what we see as ‘traditional’ engineering to enter other disciplines. I think around 25 per cent of ASX200 CEOs have an engineering background; the banking sector is crying out for people who can actually model phenomena and think creatively. So, we ‘lose’ those engineers to other fields, but we don't have the capacity to easily bring other people into our discipline to make up for them.
IT: What's the next milestone you are looking forward to in your field or your role? EL: Our first cohort of student engineers are due to complete in June 2021, and that's something that we're very much looking forward to.
IT: In 10 years, what jobs will CSU Engineering graduates be doing? EL: Changing the world.
It might sound trite, but we deliberately develop an entrepreneurial mindset in our student engineers, so they have the skills to be change agents in their careers. The worlds they are changing may only be small worlds, or they could be on a global stage; it depends on where their trajectories will take them – but with the leadership skills we're already seeing emerging, we expect our engineers to be the ones who are creating opportunities for others, to be leading organisations, or serving as role-models for engineers of the future.
IT: How are government and industry addressing the regional engineer shortage? What more is needed to meet the targets? EL: Supporting the establishment of CSU Engineering was a good start! Giving student engineers the chance to live and work in the regions means they get the opportunity to see viable career paths in regional Australia, and this opens them up to the possibilities of staying and working there.
I think there is a growing realisation that the big challenges facing communities and industry are in fact engineering challenges. Clean drinking water and energy security are at their heart engineering challenges; something like eight of the 10 points on the NSW Government’s regional development plan are similarly tasks whose solutions will rely heavily on engineering. We're seeing an increasing trend towards procurement policies that require local suppliers and the emergence of compulsory traineeships on large infrastructure projects, so I can see a world where there is an expectation that you've got regionally-based cadet engineers as a compulsory part of any large engineering project in the region.
The other game changer I see coming is regional migration. Our major cities are full, and over the next ten years we're going to see increased population growth in regional centres as people choose not to live a 90-minute commute from work. As our regional cities grow we're going to see increased opportunities not just for regional engineers to have meaningful careers, but also for their partners and their families.
Younger engineers aren't as worried about having a job for life – what they want is to know there will be another great opportunity after this one is over, and as we invest into infrastructure that lets us connect and decentralise our states, we'll see more of those opportunities emerge.
IT: What's the most misunderstood thing about engineering today? EL: That it's just about the numbers. Mathematics is the grammar of how we express ourselves to each other, but the story of engineering is so much more life-changing.
IT: What keeps you inspired about the work you do?
EL: The people I work with. I have an amazing team of colleagues who are committed to changing how civil engineering is taught, and who are willing to look to the horizon and try new things to make it work. The way they inspire our student engineers, who in turn go out and improve the lives of people in regional NSW, is just amazing to behold.
Prof Lindsay’s keynote address at IPWC 2019 will overview the CSU Engineering program, the issues that arose during its development and key features of the CSU degree.