Engineering

There's an urban myth that engineering is all about oily rags and spanners and people tinkering in sheds. Weird, because most engineers work at the forefront of design technology and they never see a spanner.

Today's engineers are likely to be designing more efficient car engines, more productive wind turbines, finding ways to increase computer processing speed or decreasing flood damage along Britain's waterways than standing by a sink looking for the Swarfega - the Royal Academy of Engineering has estimated that up to 2 million people in the UK could he classified as engineers in some form or another. This includes the oily rag brigade - they'll always be around - but technology has moved on and the range of engineering jobs available is mushrooming as new fields like nanotechnology and medical engineering open up.

The recent fall in student numbers is a tragedy, because there are huge opportunities right now in UK engineering. Just about every discipline has a shortage of good engineers, largely brought about by the decline in admissions over the last few years. This is particularly acute in the civil and chemical engineering fields, which seem to have suffered most from not being considered sexy enough to school students.

Some of the disciplines do fare a little better: electronic engineering and anything to do with the computer and communication industry pull in the most students. The laws of supply and demand also work in your favour. Salaries, which have never been spectacular, are improving for engineers as companies chase fewer and fewer graduates.

Over the past few years, changes by the Engineering Council UK, the profession's over-arching registration body, have been introduced to raise the academic entry level for chartered engineers. This means that all courses accredited by the council are now either three-year BEng or four-year MEng qualifications and usually require students to have decent A-level results to be accepted. In some sectors, especially civil and structural, becoming chartered is a prerequisite to practice, but for all sectors you'll find the financial rewards arc higher with it than without.