Top 7 Hardest Degrees for Undergrads… Is yours on the list?

Engineering has developed a tough reputation as an undergraduate degree. This reputation is unlikely to be contributing to desperately needed intake into the industry at ground level. So what’s the story and do these accounts really convey the reality of university programs in engineering related subjects?

The recent National Survey of Student Engagement took 416,000 full-time and first-year students and also seniors at a total of 670 universities across the USA to find out which majors offer the hardest ride.

They produced a Top 7:

1.       Engineering

2.       Physical sciences

3.       Biological sciences

4.       Arts and humanities

5.       Education

6.       Social sciences

7.       Business

It’s not the first time engineering has been thrown under this particular bus. And let’s make no mistake about it – this is not good news. While those who have completed the programs may get a glow of satisfaction that they have come through American college’s toughest test (with the possible exception of a football scholarship to Alabama) the bottom line is that this is a terrible PR issue for the engineering industry. Who is going to fill engineering jobs in the future if we’re scaring away perfectly capable undergraduates to other degree programs? When you were eighteen, did you want to take on the toughest challenge available? I know I didn’t. There was beer to be drunk and girls to be chased, and that’s all perfectly natural. If you’re going to dive into engineering for four years, the stats suggest that you are going to spend less time socializing and more time preparing for class than any other degree program. What you just heard in the distance is the sound of 17.5m Americans picking up the brochure for a Business degree.

The Global engineering job industry has been plagued by skill shortages ever since computer science grew legs and walked off by itself. The minds that would have been applied to structures, mechanics and electronics to engineer the planet for a generation have proved far more interested in developing software products and designing cool packaging for Apple, Microsoft and any other new technology company you care to name. Engineering has started to look like the bow-tie wearing old man in the moth eaten sport coat, trying to find his glasses while the iProfessional snowboards past him with a light beer and the captain of the cheerleading squad.

In a world where twenty-somethings are looking for somewhere to retire, it’s easy to understand why they see greater possibilities in business and IT. Take a look at the youngest billionaires and you’ll see the trend.

The question is, how do we – the engineering industry – sell young minds on the many possibilities that engineering could offer them?

Learnhub offers ten reasons to study engineering:

Money

Prestige

Professionalism

Flexibility and Choice

Intellectual Development

Entrepreneurship

Challenge

Creativity

Discovery

Helping Society

I’m not sure they’re selling the right list for Generation Y, who are looking for travel (where we can offer a great deal of opportunity), variety (also a strong suit for an engineering degree) and a chance to be part of something that creates a lasting legacy. (I’m not an engineer myself, but I worked on the UK’s first high speed rail link and it’s one of my proudest accomplishments – I feel part of it and when I catch a train to Paris, I really do feel like I helped to build it. I can only imagine how the engineers who really designed and built it feel.)

We need a rebrand. Engineering is going to have to do a better PR job if we’re going to ask young people to take on the toughest degree program on the market. Private industry needs to take the lead in presenting engineering to the market in the right way. We need to take to social media on mass and share the stories that people will respond to. Everyone loves a good human interest narrative, and all over our industry there are fantastic stories about projects and accomplishments, of friends made and good times had.

Let’s take off the old sport coat and get out on the slopes with the cool kids. There is every reason to take on the tough challenge of an engineering degree. But those considering it need our support and encouragement. Less PC and more Mac.

A very exciting world awaits our undergraduates. It’s our responsibility to show them their future.

Richard Spragg writes about a number of issues related to engineering jobs. Find out more about Talascend, about electrical engineering, about civil engineering and about mechanical engineering jobs from Our Website.  

Snakes & Ladders – How will you manage your staff against the plans you made for 2013?

The only thing you know for certain about the budget, said an old mentor of mine, is that it’s wrong.

One way or another, you’re going to have issues with the plans you made in November for the year ahead. Not surprising, given that you aimed to somehow foresee the next year’s market conditions, predict the performance of your customers and anticipate everything from super storms to the attrition of key personnel.  Then you reconciled this guess work with your shareholders’ aspirations – which are seldom modest or undemanding – to produce ‘the plan’.

Beyond the obvious problem – the fact that you have no idea if the reality will render the theory absurd – which you can’t waste your time worrying about, you have a major concern that you can and must address:

How will the ever present plan, and perceptions of success and failure, affect your staff’s actual performance?

Whatever you business, and engineering staffing is a perfectly good example, you have some ladders to take advantage of and a number of snakes to avoid in managing productivity.

Ladder 1

New Year Urgency

It’s simple. Your well rested staff return to work fired up, full of resolutions and raring to go. Success follows. Happy days.

Snake 1

New Year Attrition

Not everybody translates their ‘New year – new start’ positivity into hard work for you. January is the biggest month for hiring and job seeking. Right now one of your key staff is planning to make a fresh start of a different kind this year. You are never more vulnerable to turnover among strong performers than you are in January. Have some conversations and make sure you know how your top people are feeling.

Ladder 2

Motivation increases from strong start

So Q1 has gone great. By and large your staff over performed. The atmosphere is buzzing and there’s a great deal of confidence about the year ahead. You can harness this to drive greater productivity. Increase the optimism through the promise of additional rewards. Share some of the results of the over performance, you might see it again in Q2.

Snake 2

Complacency sets in as your staff hit the cruise control button

Some will use success to strive for more success, others will use success as a justification for slowing down. Again your answer is in adjusting rewards. You can’t use the stick for someone who’s overperformed, but you can switch the carrot out for something slightly larger and more juicy. Increase the performance rewards at the highest thresholds and motivate people to excel further.

Ladder 3

Fostering long term development

When you’re on target, you have the opportunity to invest time and energy in developing your staff. If you know they are going to hit targets, you can spare a little time for training, team building and all the other things that are, conversely, the first casualties when you begin to slip behind. When things are going well this year, give serious consideration to investing a little energy in longer term productivity. If you don’t take advantage of successful times to do this, you never will do it.

Snake 3

Entitlement increases from ‘high value / high maintenance’ mentality

Many a trajectory has begun with early success, followed by plateau and then freefall – induced by the early success itself. A proportion of the people who work with you will take pride in their success over the line and become entitled. I’m contributing all this, I should be getting more. I’m better than they are, I should be treated better. These people need me more than I need them. The worst thing about this reaction to success is that it can inflict collateral damage on other staff. Egotism is a virus and it spreads quickly. If you look to reward high performers early with extra benefits to reach for and investment in their skills, they will feel rewarded in both the short term and long term. Entitlement is never just the result of performance, it is the result of performance combined with a lack of perceived appreciation.

Ladder 4

A definition of minimum acceptable performance is understood and you can manage to it

The plan allows you to manage underperformance, because of clearly understood targets that are either met or not met. If they are not met, you have a very clear mandate to chase good performance, or to let people go accordingly. The threat of failure can be a great motivator and if you’ve got an agreed threshold, there is never any ambiguity. Make sure the staff understand the importance of accomplishing targets and then dig in to the work of helping them get there, even if it means reforecasting to meet external challenges.

Snake 4

Doom, gloom and dismal prospects will never inspire improved performance.

If your staff are chasing after a plan so unrealistic as to be entirely unachievable they will not be motivated by it and it might as well not be there. The double threat is that they will hold you responsible for signing off on the budget in the first place. Maybe you were trying to please shareholders; maybe you were just wholly unrealistic. It doesn’t matter – there’s a massive burden to carry everyday and you gave it to them. Sure, they accepted it, but what other choice did they have? If all your staff have to look forward to is one round of meetings after another where they are asked why they are so far behind the forecast, they will not stick around to endure it; they’ll just go somewhere where they can get an even break. And you know that regardless of the plan, they may just be performing better than you honestly expected.

There are many more ladders and many more snakes and I’d be fascinated to hear your own versions. The bottom line is that you’re going to play this game whatever happens; your budget will either contribute to success or to failure. Which way it goes is up to you.



Richard Spragg writes about a number of issues related to engineering jobs. Find out more about Talascend, about electrical engineering, about civil engineering and about mechanical engineering jobs from Our Website.  

How I learned to stop worrying and embrace being wrong.

There are times in life when you have to put your hands up to being in the minority, especially when you’re in the business of putting your opinions out there in the market for all to see. As a lifelong holder of minority opinions, this is not new to me.

So effusive was the disagreement with my first blog in this series, that arrived from all corners of our growing community here, that I feel compelled to present the opposite view. I will wipe the spit and fumes from my face and in all probability convince myself that I was actually wrong in the first place. The source of our disagreement all comes down to this question:

How long should you take making decisions about people?

Last time round, I advocated taking an approach to interviewing that actively sought to avoid a hasty judgment. Bide your time I said. Make sure your first impression doesn’t reinforce itself in an unhelpful way, asking easy questions of the person you like, or tough questions of the person you’re not so sure about, I said. Give them the whole time you’ve allotted to present an overall impression, I said.

Balls. You said.

Almost all the feedback I received, including one rather irate phone call, told me I was talking out of my hat. (And they didn’t say hat either.)

Prevailing wisdom it seems tends massively toward the opposite view, which in the spirit of seasonal democracy, I present to you now. Had this been one of my original blogs on interviewing mistakes I should probably have called it: ‘Trust your primary response, you will make the same decision eventually anyway.’

Some of my many dissenters on the subject refer to rapid cognition, often in reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s hugely successful book ‘Blink’, which explores what happens in our brains in the first two seconds that we encounter a given situation – a job interview being a perfectly good example.

Most of the feedback was less scientific, it just argued the case for calling it early and not wasting time over analyzing something if you know you’re going to do it anyway. The point that stuck in my mind was the Managing Director of a well known oil field services company who told me that while you can change decisions, or walk back mistakes, you can never have back the time it took you to make the decision in the first place. His point was simply that mistakes are so common place in all areas of life, human interaction being based almost exclusively on the actual experience that comes after the fact, that you are as well to make a very quick decision and then be prepared to be equally quick to reverse or adapt it if it turns out to be the wrong one.

To use the example he used, you can navel-gaze over what vacation destination is right for you, you can research it all day long, but you simply aren’t going to know if it’s right for you until you get there. Rather than endlessly debating whether or not you’re making the right decision, you’d be better served ensuring you’re in a position to act quickly if you find you’ve made the wrong decision and correct it. Over time, he argued, you’ll find that you enjoyed 95% of your vacations and not 5%, and that the time you spent second guessing your original thought ‘I feel like skiing, let’s go to Colorado’, was entirely wasted. If Colorado turns out to be too ‘this’ or too ‘that’, it was always going to be anyway. Have an escape plan to the place you’ve always liked in Napa Valley, and don’t ever go back.

A surprising number of people wanted to talk about intuition. This honestly alarms me; sufficed to say that I believe that what people describe as their ability to intrinsically know things with no basis is simply a combination of subconscious sound judgment based on experience, combined with mathematical probabilities and our wonderful human ability to ignore all the facts that don’t suit our narrative. I always trust my intuition. I’ve always been able to know what’s right for me. Really? You’ve been divorced twice, so you might want to put your skills to better use.

Overall, I might even be convinced. There is so much to be said for being decisive, but accepting fallibility. We have a huge amount of experience that we can call upon, whether we realize it or not. Our brains do this for us at speeds we cannot comprehend.

I have heard it suggested that the phenomenon of our lives flashing before our lives as we drown is nothing more than our brains scanning for anything useful it can find from previous experience that might help it escape the danger it is in.

Ultimately, the world is faster than the mind and we will see ourselves pushed and pulled by the decisions we make no matter how smart we are and how convinced we are that we are right. Perhaps it’s time to realize that we may need to jump quickly, and then be ready to jump again.

So in the spirit of quick resolutions, here’s the final Top 5 mistakes made in the interview process from all sides – you can believe me or not, argue or not (I hope you do) and offer, as always – any other ideas:

1.       The first impression trap

2.       Getting the talking / listening balance wrong

3.       Not trusting your first response

4.       Allowing decisions to slide

5.       Accepting uninformed outside advice

Next week, a new topic, new arguments to start and yet more opportunities for you to tell me how wrong I am.



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