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