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From CAD User Mechanical Magazine  Vol 20 no 06 - JUNE/JULY 2007

Having safely sent Mike Westlake on his way to the WorldSkills competition in Japan (see the last issue of CAD User Mechanical) we can look a bit closer at the increasingly urgent issue of finding the next generation of Product Design Engineers.

This is not just a side issue that I have got myself bogged down in but a major concern to manufacturing and design companies throughout the Western World.

A Product Design Engineer has to balance the skills of an engineer with an aesthetic sensibility, an understanding of market dynamics, and an eye on the effect his conceptions will have on the back pocket. In short, he has to make something that it is appealing, works, and doesn't cost the earth to make.
The problem is, we aren't getting enough of the right people that can combine all of these skills coming through the pipeline. It says so on the Internet (so it must be true!) and it is repeated by colleagues from Sweden, America, Canada, Italy and pretty much everywhere else, if my experiences at various recent international conferences are anything to go by. It has also been touched upon in my discussions with lecturers in the subject in Universities in the UK.

It's not a totally worldwide phenomenon though. Recent research indicates that the Chinese are releasing 10,000 graduate designers on the market every year (pace Xuan Yu and Liu De, who shared this information at the Industrial Design Society of America conference in Austin, TX, last year). Only a quarter of these, apparently, find a product design position, but the skills they pick up on their courses readily prepare them for other industries.

Which leads us to the following. Through the benefices of a couple of our leading CAD software developers, many thousands of schoolchildren, throughout the Western world, have early and extensive exposure to the pleasures of CAD. Patently, very few of them will end up as product design engineers. The practice has three significant benefits though. First and foremost (and this benefits the developers themselves, of course) is the fact that every time one of them has a need to use design software, the first name that they will think of will be the one they have become accustomed to using at school.

The second benefit is that the pleasure experienced in developing a creative idea through to its ultimate manufacture might persuade some students that the life of a product design engineer is not, altogether, a bad calling.
The final and most important benefit, though - one recognised by the Chinese - is that the skills involved in developing a concept, sketching out a development plan, applying a bit of market research as to its suitability for sale, researching materials for its manufacture, testing its feasibility and analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the product, and then, finally, building a prototype on a 3D printer, constitute a pretty impressive, not to say invaluable, chunk of education. What’s more, the skills learnt in the process will translate to any field outside product design where logical problem analysis, decision making and time and resource management are respected and required.

So perhaps the problem facing the industry is not a question of whether students are lacking CAD and problem-solving skills. Could it in fact be that the incentives to further those skills within the industry are missing? It may well be that we don't have the (dare I say it) `X Factor’ that kids are looking for, that we lack the appeal that media studies, gaming, and other hi-tech areas seem to have. Courses in these subjects are generally over-subscribed, whilst product design courses are filling their classes with Asian exchange students.

How then can we capture the interest of the next generation of designers? That, surely, must be the question that we as an industry need to find an answer to. CU

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