Are engineers a boring bunch? Is the job dull and badly paid? No – but you wouldn't think so from the image the industry projects. We talk to those who are trying to win the hearts and minds of tomorrow's engineers by brushing up the image of building services.
Imagine the scene, you're in the hot seat, you've reached the £1 million question. Just one answer stands between you and the jackpot. In the audience sit a hundred building services engineers. What's the hardest question they could ask you? Then it comes: "How do you solve the problem of the skills shortage in the building services industry?" You realise you don't even have a choice of answers, because no one has come up with any yet. Would you ask the audience?

The chances are that you wouldn't get much of a response. And according to many of the people charged with the task of attracting fresh blood to building services, that's the root of the problem – lack of communication skills.

Tanya Ross is director of learning and development at Buro Happold. She says: "Engineers are a very strange breed: they've probably gone into engineering because they're good at maths and quite interested in buildings, but they're not that concerned with being good at interpersonal skills. Engineers aren't terribly good at communicating. There is a reluctance to stand up and be acknowledged for doing something good. That I think is engineering's biggest handicap, and it will take a huge change to alter that. There's so much embedded reticence and inculcated self deprecation amongst engineers."

This problem is implicit in the fact that building services has been unable to sell itself as an interesting career. A negative image has developed that the profession has not made any successful attempts to change. It is easy to create a bad image, and seemingly not so easy to rectify it.

Ross adds: "Students are increasingly sophisticated and they want something glamorous. Building services isn't this. Even the continuity of employment card that we could have played fifteen years ago doesn't work now either, because construction is subject to economic cycles like any other commercial business and it isn't necessarily for life. So it doesn't sound glamorous because it's about pipes and wires, its not that well paid and the security of employment isn't there. So what's good about it?"

The lure of other, more lucrative career paths can also be highlighted as a reason for the lack of new young engineers. Paul Tymkow, head of professional development at Hoare Lea says: "We hear that a lot of graduates are being attracted to the finance sector and so on. Even from a pool of engineering students there are other sectors of society that are taking their pick and taking them outside of engineering."

Senior partner at Max Fordham Henry Luker readily admits that the financial aspect of career choice is important for today's graduates: "Within other engineering disciplines building services pay levels are at least equal or better, but against other sciences like IT then we're not competing. We would love to pay graduates more but it comes down to income, and our fees aren't high enough. If you compare our rates to those of lawyers and accountants they are so much higher. When you think of the risk that we carry, the profession is very much undervalued."

This is an issue that Hoare Lea is trying to address in its approach to its graduates, as mechanical training manager David Marshall explains: "As part of our training we're trying to encourage engineers to look further than the financial aspect. We want them to look at engineering as a career."

In last month's BSJ, CIBSE President Doug Oughton spoke about how he believes young people who are in the industry and working through their graduate training schemes will be able to relate to undergraduates, hopefully be able to put the message across in a manner that makes engineering sound like an interesting and exciting career. This is certainly something that Tanya Ross agrees with: "I think the industry has some very bright folk and they could go back to their schools and colleges and say, 'Look, I've worked on this green skyscraper that uses less energy than fourteen houses, I'm actually helping to save the planet.' Buildings are fantastic, fascinating things, every one is different, every job is different, you work with some extraordinary people, some very creative people, some amazingly frustrating people at times, but it's interesting, it's dynamic and that's the thing we have to sell to the students."

It was with these problems in mind that Ross was appointed to her newly formed post and that Buro Happold launched its Archimedes learning and development initiative. The idea behind Archimedes is to restructure the way a job is done in terms of where responsibility falls and who is in charge of a project. From this basis the project leader and job leader internal training programmes were created. The project leader is charged with the ultimate responsibility of getting the job done, and job leaders are in charge of their own disciplines. The aim of training is to improve communications between the disciplines and to give engineers training from people who have done the job and who understand the problems.

Ross believes that this is the key to the success of the training programmes so far: "Engineers are much more likely to listen to you if they think 'She's actually done that and she knows what she's talking about.' If you do it yourself you know about what you're teaching, and you become a much more credible trainer." Encompassed in the Archimedes training schemes are the graduate programmes run by Buro Happold. Ross explains: "We have graduate-plus-one-year and plus-two-years programmes where after their first and second years with us the same intake of graduates come back together and undertake some training. It's about getting the graduates all in one place and giving them a week to get to know each other and have a social life. They work on a design project for a week together and they get to see what being a consulting engineer is all about. They learn the theory at university but they don't necessarily teach you what the job is all about."

With 41 graduates across the disciplines, and a crop of 46 placement students scattered all over its UK offices, Buro Happold certainly seem to be making sure that enough young people are getting to hear about what they have to offer. Ross is adamant that it is important to make these students aware that if there is an area in which they hold a particular interest, the business will do everything possible to allow them to follow that interest up: "Our students come from a wide range of courses and we give them the opportunity to see what it's like and see the options available to them. We have a current graduate who, when she came to see us, had done her thesis at university on cold climate shelters and lining them to make them more efficient. She was keen to pursue the project so we allowed her to spend one day a week on it and treated it as an r&d project. So she is working as a structural engineer but doing this project one day a week. That's obviously what lights her candle and she loves it."

Ross sees this as where Buro Happold sell themselves to the graduates they attract– demonstrating to them at interview stage the amount of time and money they invest in learning and development and showing that the business will make attempts to give incoming graduates a shot at what they want to do. Ross herself is a case in point of this approach: "I came in as a building services engineer but decided I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to leave the construction business so they found me a slot as an m&e quantity surveyor. It completely satisfied me and I think that's true of a lot of people here. If they have a particular interest they will do their best to make it work within the constraints of the organisation."

At Hoare Lea they also view their training schemes – accredited by CIBSE and IEE – as the key to attracting a high calibre of graduate to the practice, and favour recruiting individuals who have taken the opportunity to spend their holiday months finding out what the job is really like. They currently have 36 paid placement students across their UK offices. Tymkow says: "One of the tremendous benefits of the placement scheme is that we can see them in the real environment and we think the best way to recruit anyone is after they have been through a placement. It's an important way of getting people to know about us, getting students to come here, experience it, and hopefully want to continue with us." Placement students are treated along similar lines to graduates who have been recruited on to Hoare Lea's accredited training programmes. They are allocated to live project teams and work under a training supervisor who is their direct point of contact. Above the training supervisor sits one training mentor in each office, implementing the scheme. Tymkow believes that this method is the most effective in aiding the graduates' development: "We think the relationship of an experienced engineer taking responsibility for an inexperienced person is the way for it to work. They go onto a design team immediately working on live projects, and they respond tremendously. They respect the fact that they're on a live design team and they acquire skills and make a contribution."

The practice tries to ensure that their scheme is what attracts graduates to Hoare Lea in the first instance, as Tymkow explains: "We look on every top quality graduate we land as a prize because we know there are another five or six firms who'd like to get them. We do put an awful lot of effort into the process. We are building the future of the firm and the importance of graduate recruitment is immense to us, as is our placement scheme." The strong point as they see it, is that a graduate can clearly see the path of progression which hopefully leads to chartership. "We have comprehensive documentation which describes the scheme and the way it works in practice. We find that people are very much taken by the fact that it's very obviously structured and managed in a particular way. People are allocated to roles to look after them and it's diverse. One of the messages that we get across in the documentation is that we are looking to make them into well rounded people." At Max Fordham they take a different approach to the attraction of new engineers, as Henry Luker explains: "The main way is through adverts that we place in the Prospects directory, that explains a bit about us and what we look for. We also do some teaching in universities which hopefully gets our name around. But we're not just targeting pure m&e engineers, we look for bright graduates with a science background - physics, maths, and we've even got a botanist. So we cast our net quite wide." Luker explains that the company feels that building services courses "spoon feed" students in terms of finding solutions to problems. By netting graduates of other sciences, Luker says that the practice can attract people who are able to address problems from different directions. "We're looking for people who can take a more holistic approach and look at the whole building first, rather than just the services that they're going to put into it." To this end, Max Fordham have a CIBSE accredited training scheme, but place the emphasis heavily on flexibility, allowing their graduates to fulfil its requirements through the projects they work on. At interview stage too, their approach of looking for self starters is evident, setting a task for interviewees to see how they go about coming up with a solution. "We set them a problem about how air moves around a room. We don't expect them to come up with the answer, but we're looking for the thought process, how they apply the things they've been taught at university. We're not looking for people who just recite what they've been taught. We want people who have gained knowledge in certain areas and can apply it to an unknown problem."

Head of human resources at Max Fordham, Rebecca Reeves, says there is a discernible drop in numbers of suitable graduates. "The response we've had from the Prospects advert has been going down in terms of numbers and quality of applicants. We're currently reviewing our recruitment methods and how we advertise the vacancies. Hits to recruitment websites are going up, so the electronic method of recruitment is something that we're looking at." The practice takes on around 15 graduates each year, and currently has six summer placement students: "We have some success with those students applying to us when they graduate. If they've got to know us over the summer then we have more to base a decision on than just an interview. If we can get them back summer after summer then you can hopefully build on that relationship."

The formation of early relationships with prospective employees is high on the agenda with most practices. Hoare Lea builds relations with universities and currently sponsor twenty-one students on degree courses. At Nottingham University they also offer two awards for outstanding performance on the building environment engineering course. One if for the entrant with the highest A level grades and the other is for the best all round final year student. Tymkow points out that the awards are yet another way of promoting themselves to undergraduates: "It's something that we're looking to expand and is part of the profile that we're building at Nottingham, UMIST and other universities. Giving awards is a good thing and again it identifies top quality people."

Communication skills – or lack of – is something that Hoare Lea knows needs to be addressed. There is a lot on communications built into their 31 module training programme , making sure to emphasise it's importance for the modern day engineer, as Marshall says: "I think there is a new generation of people coming through. We're not trying to replicate the previous generation of engineers. We are trying to create people with a more diverse range of skills and high on the agenda of that are communication skills."

It seems clear that the building services industry has identified its shortcomings, but there is much work to be done to establish a better image. The fact is that every sector has some rather dull elements. IT may pay well but who wants to sit in front of a computer screen all day? Media sounds glamorous but the pay can be very low, and job security is non existent. As for accountants. their once almost priest-like status has taken several heavy blows in recent months. Somehow these careers have avoided dwelling on the down-side.

The great things about building services need to be emphasised more. Being able to communicate these factors clearly has to be the ultimate goal.

Only then, will the potential engineers of tomorrow sit up and take notice of building services as a career, and only then will high quality individuals stop being lost to apparently more attractive professions.