At the current time, 702 apprenticeship standards are listed on the UK Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) website. When we drill down into the detail, we see that of these 702 standards, 516 are approved for delivery, over…
Continue ReadingThe first outline T Level content for the IfATE Engineering and Manufacturing (E&M) route, for the Design and Development pathway, is now published. In our opinion it maps out a high-quality programme of core education for young people aspiring to…
Continue ReadingIn our previous post, we looked at the current IfATE Engineering Technician standard and found that most of its options were potentially misplaced in the current IfATE occupational map. This represents a considerable rework to the map if it were…
Continue ReadingIn our previous post, we suggested that the upcoming review of IfATE’s occupational maps might also be a good time to review their purpose, audience and terms of reference and rework them into the form of skills frameworks, such as…
Continue ReadingThe Institute of Apprenticeships and Technical Education’s (IfATE’s) Engineering and Manufacturing occupational map is due for review. In this short blog series’ we ask if this might be an appropriate time to take a look at its potential for an…
Continue ReadingIn our previous posts[1][2], we observed that the occupational requirements and job content profiles shown in O*NET for Industrial Engineering Technologists indicate that higher entry qualification levels may be required than for Mechanical Engineering Technologists. We further found that Industrial…
Continue ReadingIn our previous post we observed that the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) technique for O*NET work styles indicates that Industrial Engineering Technologists, along with Mechanical Engineers, score relatively higher in Innovation than the other occupations we were examining. We will…
Continue ReadingIn this previous post, we identified that the education profiles for industrial engineering and mechanical engineering technologist occupations in O*NET data deviate from the pattern we would expect to see. In Industrial Engineering, the proportion of technologists with bachelor’s degrees…
Continue ReadingThe titles and meanings of engineer, technician and – increasingly – technologist occupations are still very loose. In the Institute for Apprenticeships (IfATE’s) apprenticeship standards, for instance, we see ‘engineer’ standards as low as level 2[1] and ‘technician’ standards as…
Continue ReadingIn the UK labour market there appears to be a distinct and emerging set of occupations referred to as ‘technologists’. However, they are not properly recognised as occupations within the UK Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) in the same way as,…
Continue Reading