THE ENGINEER.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 845, 17 June 1910, Page 2

THE ENGINEER.

_—4 HIS PROSPECTS IN BRITAIN. In the May issue of the ."Canterbury College Review" Mr. J. S. S. Cooper, an old student of the college who is now with the Westinghouso Company in London, writes pessimistically of the outlook for any engineering graduate who proposes to go to Britain for experience. "In the electrical arid other manufacturing concerns of this country," MrCooper writes, "there is no demand for the graduate fresh from technical school or college. Ho is expected to arrive with a fat premium struggling to escape into the company's safe. He must then work for at least three or four years before he gets a living wage. I pay thirty-bob-a-week the compliment of calling it a living wage. After that lie climbs. Slowly if brilliant, very slowly if just ordinary, and not at all if dull. (The above does, not apply to (1) those with an uncle on the board of directors, (2) those whose Sarents or guardians have a .£50,000 orer to place by and by.) ' - "This seems no doubt very unjust and terrible, but it is all easily explained. Laws of supply and demand save.no traffic with justice or ethics, and hold no stock in Should, Ought and Co. The demand for technically-trained men with little or no practical commercial experience is asymptotic to' the zero line. They are not immediately remunerative to their employers. They arc a material half raw, half finished. The supply has Legion for its cognomen. That is ono reason. The other reason is that the manufacturer or other potontial employer lias no money to spend. Staffs are everywhere being reduced. Fully-trained men aro leaving the profession. Factories are half filled with work taken at 'strictly competitive prices.' To go again behind this and find the why and the wherefore, would lead us, I fear, too far afield, and land us in the swamps of argument, the quicksands of personal opinion, the quagmire of controversy. "I have seen one New Zealand graduate spend three years in the shops as an improver, and ht had done some years of practical work before coming over. I have seen another, a Canterbury College ongineerin' B.Sc., trying for months tb get a job—gradually allowinj his notions of value to drop till he finally took work at anythini but a "living wage.' I hare seen numbers of university-trained colonials on apprenticeship courses at rates of pay ranging from seven to thirteen shillings a week. I have seen a Sydney University graduate moved almost to tears when he found hin services were worth wnw .fS'i a year. After nil that, what is left for me to any? Don't, come over heTe for experience, though the very best nf experience is certainly to be obtained, unless you have cither influence or enough money to live on for two or three years, and then not unless you have grit. "It is a sad talc, a counsel of despair. Perhaps you had better take off 10 per cent, for' the personal equation of the writer, who is a pessimist in spite of rather exceptional good fortune in the profession. But the remaining 00 per cent, may be enough to save many a son of our good old Alma Mater from sorrow awl hardship in a land of exile."