How do we encourage more budding engineers into the industry?

Those of you who attended the NMI Annual General Meeting last week will have heard three inspiring talks from the invited speakers.

Indro Mukerjee of CMAC Technology raised the important issue of how we encourage more engineers into the industry and I believe that the NMI are working to raise this issue with government given the declining numbers of undergraduates entering relevant courses in UK Universities.

Indro talked about taking the solution back further down the "food chain" into schools and trying to get more teenagers excited about a career in electronics.

This reminded me of the " Thank an Engineer" series of videos created by Texas Instruments depicting what life would be like today without those of us who have developed most of the technology that we all take for granted.
For any of you who have missed them, they can be found at:

http://www.ti.com/thanks

I think these are a fun way in which to depict engineering as "cool" and perhaps get schoolchildren to think about what they could contribute for their generation.

Clearly the welcome introduction of the Young Engineer Award by the NMI will help to enthuse those who have already chosen this as a career (Well done Anna Gilbert of NXP) but I agree with Indro that we also need to look further down the pipeline.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

Trevor