Discussions on implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals have not, so far, addressed the crucial role of engineering. Achieving the goals will depend on large productivity increases in emerging economies, and engineers will be influential actors in that effort. However, neither engineering education nor contemporary definitions of engineering address the urgent need for productivity improvement: enabling people to achieve more with less human effort, energy, materials, uncertainty, health risks and environmental disturbances. It is possible that global slowing of productivity growth, particularly in advanced economies, could be associated with this oversight.
Extensive research on engineering practice in Australia, Brunei, India and Pakistan has shown how social culture and knowledge gaps make technical collaboration much more difficult in emerging economies, leading to high costs and low productivity. This research also identified a small number of expert engineers who have been able to create highly productive enterprises around them, despite these difficulties.
Deep structural issues in contemporary education limit the ability of universities to build on this research to improve engineering education. Education in workplaces could avoid these difficulties. The research is being applied to create a workplace education programme that could help novice and mid-career engineers learn from the experience of this small cohort of experts. Achieving the UN goals could well depend on how successfully such education programmes can improve engineering practice in emerging economies.
There are huge opportunities and rewards for engineers who can grasp new ideas on value generation, and overcome a hundred or more misconceptions about engineering practice that (mostly) inadvertently arise through contemporary engineering education programs. Engineering educators with the courage to learn about this research could be extremely influential in transforming their countries and overcoming barriers to social and economic development that lie in the minds of today’s engineers.
Speaker // James Trevelyan
Professor James Trevelyan is an engineer, educator, researcher and has recently become a start-up
entrepreneur. He is CEO of Close Comfort, a tech start-up introducing new
energy-saving, low emissions air conditioning technology to Australia,
Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries with a vast potential global market.
His research on engineering practice helped define the current Engineers
Australia professional competencies for chartered engineers. His book “The
Making of an Expert Engineer” and advances in understanding how engineers
contribute commercial value are influencing the future of engineering education
in universities and workplaces. His new book “30 Second Engineering” will
help build greater awareness of the key importance of engineering and reach a
global audience in about 25 languages eventually. He is best known
internationally for pioneering research that resulted in sheep shearing robots
from 1975 till 1993 and for the first industrial robot that could be remotely
operated via the internet in 1994. He received the leading international
award for robotics research, equivalent to the Fields medal in mathematics. In
2018 he was awarded West Australian of the Year in the professions category in
recognition of his achievements.