Is Israel’s innovation industry in the hands of young engineers?

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By now, the issue of talent shortage in Israel’s hi-tech scene has been well documented.

According to the Israel Innovation Authority’s State of Hi-Tech 2022 report, the country’s tech industry is experiencing a dramatic shortage of engineers and programmers; an earlier report by Israeli state comptroller Matanyahu Engelman found there were 18,500 vacancies in the hi-tech sector.

Yet Prof. Noam Eliaz, dean of the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University is not deterred by these challenges.

Israeli hi-tech engineers will always be in high demand

“Because the industry will always seek out the most talented engineers, we believe our engineers will always be in high demand in any given economic crisis,” he said, adding that in 2022, TAU alumni were ranked seventh in the world in the prestigious PitchBook rankings for entrepreneurship and was the only university outside the United States to make the Top 10.

The professor. Ami Moyal, president of Afeka – The Academic College of Engineering in Tel Aviv believes that the media is looking at this looming problem the wrong way by defining the situation as a dilemma facing the “tech industry”.

First Israeli nanosatellite designed at TAU ​​to communicate from space with optical ground station (credit: TAU)

Moyal instead focuses on what he describes as the “innovation industry”. He suggests that professionals in all sectors, whether they work in medicine, government, banking or elsewhere, must possess a multidisciplinary skill set to drive innovation. And this is where engineering comes into play.

“In a long-term strategic vision, the Israeli economy needs more engineers because the job market will become increasingly [science, technology, engineering and math] STEM-oriented,” says Moyal.

“We will need engineers not only in the hi-tech industry but also in the classic industries which will be forced to incorporate innovation”.

Eliaz can attest to the success of this approach, as TAU is “the first [university] in Israel to offer multidisciplinary university programs, such as engineering and humanities or digital sciences for hi-tech,” he explains.

TAU students are tracking industry and employment trends currently gravitating to energy, space, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, defense, quantum technologies, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing and bioconvergence, he adds.

In some ways, the students themselves are responding to these changing times, with engineering the most popular academic discipline among Israeli university students in recent years, according to the Council for Higher Education.

But that doesn’t mean that the workforce necessarily receives the kind of entry-level engineers who meet the needs of companies and, by extension, the engineers who will help Israel maintain its global status as an innovation powerhouse.

As a result, Afeka College embarked on a curriculum transformation journey in which it adapted the same engineering design methodology used in the hi-tech industry to develop products, with the aim of transforming its engineering education process. This methodology is rooted in the six fundamental principles of engineering design: ask, imagine, plan, create, experiment and improve.

The college surveyed 103 Israeli hi-tech companies about the skills and knowledge base they expect from entry-level employees. The result was what the institution calls a “graduate profile,” encompassing scientific knowledge, engineering knowledge, engineering skills, personal skills, ethics, languages, and broad knowledge.

“We asked ourselves, what is the graduate profile of the engineer who is graduating from Afeka, that if we were able to measure all those skills, we would be very satisfied with the result,” says Moyal.

“When I took office [as president of Afeka College]”, he reflects, “I put a lot of fundamental questions on the table. The first was: Do we know exactly what the hi-tech industry needs from an engineer? Second, do we know what the new generation of students are bringing in from high school and how do they want to learn?

Today’s Afeka students, he says, are a “completely different breed” from their predecessors.

“Sitting in class for eight hours a day just doesn’t suit them,” she says. “We needed to change the pedagogy to be more project-based and practice-based and to provide a learning experience.”

Engineering education, Moyal explains, “is not like boot camp.”

“As an engineer, you acquire scientific knowledge, engineering knowledge and skills. You can develop new products. It’s a completely different educational path.”

Meanwhile, TAU’s approach to changing times in the engineering industry has involved partnering with institutions around the world in order to amplify what students can achieve in an increasingly globalized workplace.

For example, the university’s partnership with Northwestern University in Illinois is “a wonderful example of a deep and multifaceted relationship that has been nurtured for the benefit of our faculty and students at all levels,” says Eliaz.

“The workshop proved to be one of the key success factors of the new strategic plan we are developing. We are interested in developing, for example, dual PhD programmes, joint workshops, joint research seed money, joint online courses, joint post-docs, student exchange, gap years and so on.

Yet despite these two experts’ belief in the potential of Israel’s next generation of engineers, they acknowledge that there is still room for improvement in the country’s approach to STEM education as a whole.

“It’s no secret that students are poorly prepared for academic studies in science and mathematics. There is a huge shortage of math and natural science teachers in high schools. Also, the classes have too many students, which makes enrichment of high-level labs impossible,” says Eliaz.

Moyal agrees with this assessment and advocates a ‘minimum level of STEM education’ for all pupils in primary and secondary education and a higher level for those who wish to continue studying STEM subjects in higher education. With technology advancing at an exponential rate while simultaneously changing the world, Moyal believes Israel has no choice but to go down this path.

One of the college’s recommendations for the country is the formation of a national STEM committee composed of government officials and academic and industry leaders, which would present the vision and terminology used for STEM at all levels of the educational continuum, from kindergarten to higher education.

“If you can implement graduate profiling in high school, primary school, and even kindergarten, set goals for the educational process,” Moyal says.

“Everything in the future world will be digital, so we need to equip students with the tools to succeed in a STEM-based economy right from kindergarten.”

Eliaz hopes to roll up his sleeves and get involved on a personal level, saying he aspires “to lead a K-12 program in Israel that will both contribute to STEM education in schools and help us promote outreach activities.”

In the area of ​​new space and the successful launch of nano-satellites, he says, TAU’s Faculty of Engineering is considered the best in the world.

“In the past two years we have successfully launched three nano-satellites. Thanks to this, we recently won a tender from the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology to design and build a fleet of nanosatellites in schools on the outskirts of Israel and launch it into space from Cape Canaveral.”

Ultimately, while layoffs and inflation are painting a bleak economic picture at the moment, Eliaz and Moyal agree that the sky is the limit both figuratively and literally for students fighting for a future in STEM, that is, if academic institutions empower them with the tools they need to succeed in a changing landscape.

“The whole world around us, especially industry and students, is changing,” says Moyal, “so we have to change.”

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