Case of disappearing engineers remains unsolved

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.

Australian Engineers Week – Who cares? (apart from us engineers.)

 by Richard Spragg


Anyone who owns a television knows that this week is one of the most important weeks in the annual calendar. From August 1^st – August 7^th the world comes together to honor the most advanced and powerful beings on earth. That’s right folks, it’s Shark Week. 

Every nature channel, newspaper and magazine is dominated by savage looking pictures of these four hundred million year old beasts leaping ten feet out of the water and ripping their prey to shreds. Everyone loves a good shark – not up close and personal maybe, but few things make a better photograph or news story than a Great White. 

It’s also Australian Engineers Week. This is not quite so high profile, but perhaps that’s understandable, after all engineers can’t smell a single drop of blood in the ocean from a mile away. (Although I met a project director or two who would have a bloody good try.)

The comparison got a few of us here to thinking about the real source of a lot of our problems in the global engineering community. In a world where we see skill shortages almost everywhere, where technical projects of all shapes and sizes are threatened by a lack of available resources, we have to ask ourselves – what are we doing to attract more people into our industry? How can we make a career in engineering appealing to the next generation of potential engineers? 

This week, Engineers Australia (www.engineersaustralia.org) published its statistical overview for 2011 and one of the major conclusions of the study is that the number of new graduates entering the field has grown much slower than demand. We simply aren’t bringing as many people into engineering at a ground floor level as we need to. 

The results of low entry to the industry are obvious. Above all it means an increased dependence on overseas workers (52% of the engineering labor market was born overseas, compared to an average of 36% in other industries.) Engineering is a global community – there will always be an important flow of skills across national borders, and Australia is no different from any other country in importing necessary skills as they’re needed. But ultimately, Australia must grow and develop a home grown resource pool for everyone’s benefit and evidence shows that its ability to do that has flat lined. 

The solution has to come from inside the industry. What are we doing, as engineers, as employers, as contractors and as agencies to encourage increased participation from the next generation of engineers?

If the answer is ‘nothing’, then we cannot complain when our projects run out of staff, the majority of our workforce comes from outside Australia and our ability to deliver projects suffers now and in the future.

You don’t have to be a shark to see the trouble coming a long way off.


Talascend Australia is currently working with major employers in Australia's engineering market to find original answers to skill shortage issues. To contact us, visit www.talascend.com/australia