Skill shortages are threatening America’s Engineering & Construction industries. We all acknowledge that the problem exists. You will find more people in this country who deny the existence of climate change than deny that America is desperately short of engineers. There is simply nobody on the other side of the argument.
Today the New York Times highlights a new and worrying aspect of the problem in a front page story (Where the jobs are, training may not be by Catherine Rampell.)
 |
| The future of the engineering workforce is seriously unclear. |
Cuts in education spending resulting from economic woes are kicking us where we can least suffer the blow. The latest problem? Expensive technical classes are being cut before anything else at cash-strapped public colleges all over the country. Teaching technical subjects is expensive. Science, technology, healthcare and engineering require equipment and materials that you simply don’t need to teach Literature or Philosophy. This is not a rant about arts and humanities programs and what they contribute to American industry – we need philosophers, we need journalists and yes Governor Perry – we need anthropologists. We just don’t need them nearly as badly as we need engineers.
It’s probably valuable to explain why the engineering skill pool is in such a poor state of repair. There’s a number of reasons, but these are the top 5:
1. Pull of the IT sector during the 80’s and 90’s.
The IT sector (electronics, programming and so on) sucked a huge number of technical minds away from civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. Those people are in their 40s now, and they represent the age group and level of experience that is scarcest in the industry today.
2. Baby Boomers are bowing out
The huge generation born in the late 40s are retiring now. These are our senior people, the experienced engineers who might have hung around until their late sixties in order to fund their retirement. But these people prospered in the last three decades; they got rich on tax free assignments in the Middle East and high dollar contracts that lasted ten years instead of ten months and many have looked to retire early, cashing out at 60 on final salary pension schemes, their mortgages long since paid off.
3. Women
Since the 1970s, every industry has seen massive rises in the percentage of female entrants. Not engineering and construction. 11% of engineers are women; you can dress the statistics up as much as you like – this is contemptible. (40% of lawyers becoming partners this year will be women; 33% of doctors are female; Chartered Accountants? – 41%). In the race for the hearts and minds of women choosing a profession, we are failing miserably.
4. Outsourcing undermining intake
There’s a joke circulating our community at the moment. What’s the first thing you teach an undergraduate in Engineering 101? How to say Do you want fries with that? in Chinese. As young people watch technical jobs being outsourced, it’s difficult to sell them on the career choice. Whether their perception is accurate or not (it’s not) the fact is that the perception that engineering is not an outsource-proof choice of career is hurting us.
5. Today’s issue – we’ve stopped teaching.
Today’s issue merits a place in the top 5. If we shut off the pipeline now by failing to make classes available to those who want to train, will that make things better or worse in the future? Enough said.
Nobody in the United States of America is working on a solution to the long term problem of technical skill shortages. Not the private sector, not education, not government – nobody. We need ideas – real ones – that can be applied now and sustained. Without this effort, from everyone in the industry, we’re going to continue our current slide.
Next week:
Part 2 - Solutions to the engineering skill crisis - what's on the table?
Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.
Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.
