When Professor John Wood became Imperial College London’s new principal of the Faculty of Engineering in the summer he announced a grand vision for the department.

“I believe that engineering is a key component for solving many of the challenges facing our society from energy provision to new approaches to health delivery,” he said. “Engineering needs to be holistic. We need future engineers to take a sustainable approach.”

ethicalcareers.org’s Trina Wallace caught up with the straight-talking professor to ask him about ethical job opportunities in engineering.

What kind of ethical job opportunities are there in engineering?

I don’t think any particular branch of engineering is more or less ethical than any other. You need to have knowledge about every engineering discipline to solve problems. If you take energy provision, for instance, the whole issue about what we should do about transport, solving that would involve mechanical and some chemical engineering. How you control systems to not pollute the environment, that’s electronic engineering.

Professor John Wood

You could put all those together and say that’s “ethical engineering”. But you could also put all those disciplines together and create an atomic or a hydrogen bomb. Whether the job itself is ethical is about what problem you’re tackling rather than what form of engineering you’re involved in.

All the big challenges before us - health, transport, energy provision and the environment - these are things that engineering can do to solve the problems. But when we talk about engineering a solution, it’s not just engineering, you need a lot of other activity as well. Political decisions, for example. If there are no incentives to look for energy solutions perhaps people won’t do it. Engineering is very much about team work.

Why should ethical job seekers consider a career in engineering?

If people are interested in solving society’s problems, engineering is a very good way to start because it’s about looking for solutions. You can choose to use engineering in other ways but you can choose to use any subject you study in good or bad ways.

The jobs are there and there are some very exciting ones around. There are areas of engineering, like environmental engineering, with major skills shortages. More and more engineers see an engineering degree as a base discipline as they move from one branch of the profession to another.

Challenges for engineers include global warming, energy requirements and keeping old people warm. Anybody who is a responsible citizen will want to tackle something like that, wherever they are coming from.

Are more women going into engineering?

It’s quite true that in the traditional areas of engineering education things really haven’t improved very much. On the other hand, you find that in bio engineering and health care engineering the number of women are increasing. From my perspective, women are more interested in a holistic approach to engineering than perhaps the more traditional men’s view of wanting to study a single subject. But that’s a generalisation.

We need more people with more engineering skills to actually make things. The key issue for engineering at the moment, and the whole of science, is the need for more people, who are very practical and not academic, to take modern apprenticeships.

What questions should an ethical job seeker looking for a career in engineering ask a potential employer?

Annual reports are not easy things to read but you should. See what it says about carbon footprints and how they treat employees, how they look towards solving or taking part in the massive global challenges that are before us.

Talk to one or two employees before you go to interview. Do your homework first and have two or three questions that are important to you. Don’t go with 20 or 30 questions because that shows you’re undiscerning and don’t know what to ask. You could ask what their attitude is to open innovation or whether they are investing in local universities. If there's nothing about these issues on their website or annual report, ask the interviewer why.That may tell you all you need to know. 

Any advice for ethical job seekers looking for a career in engineering?

It’s very easy to be critical from outside and idealistic but you need a degree of reality. It’s better to get something done 80% right than to get it gold plated. Because if you want to get something gold plated, you may find you’re not going to influence anything for good. And you influence far more within an organisation than being critical outside. Of course, if it gets to the stage when you don’t think you can hold your position because of your ethics, you move on.

Most companies have whistle blowers so if something is wrong you can go to them. There are companies who are not wholesome but often you won’t know that until you’re working for them. 

I don’t think engineers are given enough credit for trying to tackle these issues. If you get in there you make a real difference. Here at Imperial College London we’ve identified climate change as a key research area; we’re developing a green, zero-carbon racing car and are looking at health care systems that keep people healthy until the end. These are all engineering solutions. Engineers make ideas happen.

Imperial College London
www.imperial.ac.uk