Mechanical engineers don’t all spend their days wearing grubby overalls and wrestling with moving parts that won’t. They’re as likely to be designing a new piece of kit for a pharmaceutical company, maintaining manufacturing equipment in a factory, adapting a production process to minimise its impact on the environment or even running the show.

It’s the big social and economic problems around energy and the environment that bring engineers into their own, says David Wright, chief executive of the West Midlands Manufacturing Advisory Service. “The solutions to all our environmental and energy issues will not come from politicians or green lobbyists but from scientists and engineers,” he says. For example, Britvic, the soft drinks company, has halved its energy use in four years thanks to projects driven by engineers.

Other areas in which mechanical engineers’ skills will be in particular demand in the future include manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, transport, utilities and medical technologies.

Jim Stewart, a project engineering manager at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmith-Kline, says that engineers are needed for almost everything that his company does, from improving distribution systems to keeping factories running. “And we are constantly updating things such as our drug delivery systems,” he says. “For instance, inhalers. People will be familiar with the aerosol-type inhaler but there’s also a move towards dry powder inhalers. Mechanical engineers were involved designing these devices, making sure they are economical, can be manufactured in large numbers easily and that they don’t have an unnecessarily negative environmental impact.”

One way of attracting young people into engineering is to show them the cool technology that they’ll get to work with, says Chris Spray, a general manager at Britvic. “We bring in small bottles the size of test-tubes and we blow them up until they are regular-sized bottles,” he says. And it’s engineers who are in charge of the machinery that does this 48,000 times per hour. “Or they could end up running a multisite multi-million-pound business, being responsible for 300 people.”

But it’s not just big companies that employ engineers, Wright says. “There is a lot of work in small and medium enterprises,” he says. “For a young engineer a SME can offer more interesting and challenging work earlier.” Large companies often offer more structured training programmes, but SMEs’ relative lack of resources mean that talented engineers can race up the career ladder.

“And, of course, there are a lot more SMEs than large corporations. Something like 90 per cent of the UK’s manufacturing business is in SMEs.”

Part of Martin Weston’s job as education and skills executive at EEF, the manufacturers’ group, is to develop the workforce to fill skill gaps currently dogging the UK. One challenge is to get across the message that there are plenty of good long-term opportunities there. “Every year 10,000 technicians are required. It’s a career with a future, and it’s well-paid.”

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