A coming engineering shortage ? ---- Who agrees ? 86

[MJCronin]

A recent article says that there will be an acute shortage ... particularly in the electrical field !!!

http://www.csemag.com/single-articl...hortage/7b350ef419c231a9f82abc6c8bd8fac4.html

Who agrees ???

Who strongly disagrees ???

MJCronin
Sr. Process Engineer

 

[IRstuff]

"inflate student grades beyond a 4.0 on an almost infinite scale"

Speaking of statistics, where would I find such as school, since the highest weighted GPA I've seen is 5.0, and I think it would be pretty obvious that something was amiss if a student graduated from high school with even a 6.0, don't you think? And, what is "almost infinite," is it like 3/4 of infinity or higher?

I suggest that you do some research on what you claim grade inflation, when most schools have a rigid formula for what classes get higher GPAs, which are those that represent AP or honors, or IB that impose a greater burden on the student to achieve an A grade, compared to a normal class.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[WARose]

Would you pick a BSEE from Stanford or one from Texas A&M?

Some of that would depend (I think) on what I was doing. The Stanford guy would probably be good if I was at a R&D firm.....the A&M guy if I was doing more (straight up) design work.

Or would he? I worked with a A&M guy once (who was right out of school)......and he turned a (5 minute) single footing design into a 2 week research project. You never really know what you are getting.

 

[CWB1]

I suggest that you do some research on what you claim grade inflation, when most schools have a rigid formula for what classes get higher GPAs, which are those that represent AP or honors, or IB that impose a greater burden on the student to achieve an A grade, compared to a normal class.

I've been to more than a dozen state and national school boards' association conventions as my family has long been heavily involved in education, no need to research anything thanks.

Yes, some schools may adjust student grades back to 4.0 when using an extended scale and/or offering extra credit, unfortunately many do not. There is no national standard for K-12 scoring and even state standards are rather rare, the logic being that schools are free to grade as appropriate so long as students are passing standardized testing. In many districts this leads to students having GPAs above 4.0 on a 4.0 scale, with the only real limitation to their score being the amount of inflation the schools offer. The grading scale is indeed "almost infinite." Regarding AP courses and "normal" classes, I wouldnt differentiate the two. ~1/3 of students take and pass AP courses but most students are eligible, and many "top" students' local honors courses today are courses taken through a local university rather than the quasi-college AP offered to the masses.

Circling back to the topic of "top" colleges, as mentioned many of these are proudly open only to those students with unethical, unrealistic scores that don't accurately compare them to their peers.

 

[IRstuff]

OK, obviously, your experience is quite different than mine. UC Berkeley has a fixed 4.0 scale for entering freshman and allows only a few extra points for advanced classes. Berkeley's standards pretty drives everything in the state, including the school schedule, now.

A lot of schools boast about "passing" the AP exam, which gets you a 3, and not much else, and even then their statistics show that 40% of their students get less than a 3.

In my local high school, having fewer than 90% of the students getting 5's would be a lousy year. The high school AP Calculus class is tailored to match the state college calculus class, and the student get state college transcript credit for that class.

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[MFJewell]

even then their statistics show that 40$ of their students get less than a 3.

How many students can you buy for 40 bucks?

 

[cranky108]

So will there be a shortage of quality engineers?

Is book smart the same as actual ability?

 

[ScottyUK]

There's already a shortage, it just isn't across every industry. My generation is largely missing from the UK's power industry: the engineers are either gray-haired looking forward to retirement day, or they're relatively recent graduates. There aren't many mid-career engineers in this industry in the 40 - 50 y.o. age range because the denationalisation of the industry 30 years ago resulted in a decade-long gap in recruitment which has never been adequately filled.

The book-smart grads - most of whom who are far better qualified than I am, on paper - struggle because they have nowhere to learn the practical skills needed, and an operational plant doesn't make for a great sandbox for them learn safely. They have little feel for how things work in the real world, and although they are smart enough to recognise this shortfall they just don't have any way of fixing the problem.

 

[cranky108]

I can say the same thing about power engineering text books. The new ones are great in theory, but that does not always work out in the real world.

I'm just waiting to hear the next person ask me if we can measure GIC (1/2 Hz waveform) with our current fleet of relays. Why is the answer not right there for those with electrical backgrounds?

All that for a maybe once in 100 year event.

 

[spraytechnology]

Reagan Thacher globalization, I sure the middle age generations remember that.....we only ripe the dividents....

 

[ScottyUK]

Cranky - I agree. I have a handful of reference books which were published long before I was born, and they are really well written. One of my favourites is a book on protection by Metropolitan-Vickers: it's obviously all old-school stuff but the explanations of how it works are superb. New texts just gloss over the mathematical magic that happens inside a numerical relay. There's a similar set on switchgear - mainly bulk oil gear with some new-fangled air-blast types at transmission voltage. Again, brilliantly written.

spraytechnology - I remember Thatcher's reign all too well.

 

[cranky108]

If you can make more money in engineering, than teaching, why would anyone bother teaching? There are a few who believe it is a noble thing to do. There are several who can't actually do engineering, so they teach. And likely there are some others.

The point is that not all engineering schools teach practical engineering. And for those who are better suited for lab work, great do that.

The same with text books. The real world requires some understanding, not just theory.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I disagree with that those who can't teach. All of my professors in graduate school were all well qualified and could have easily have had careers in industry. Dr.Mork at Michigan Tech. was with Burns and Mac before pursuing his Ph.D. Dr.Bohmann sits on several energy chairs. Dr.Weaver was with Caterpillar before got tired of the politics. Brian Johnson at University of Idaho could walk away from academia and be hired in as a consulting almost anywhere. They probably all had different motives but I think for the most part they got tired of industry rather than industry got tired of them.

I think what happens more often is that industry doesn't know what to do with someone that constantly wants to see knew stuff and gets tired of repetitive routines. Most of the Ph.Ds I have met in industry were very capable and the worst were being used in ways that didn't play to their strengths. The employer hired the Ph.D so they wouldn't have train them on certain software packages ,for example, but once past the initial training in there wasn't any room to progress.

 

[moltenmetal]

Things have changed Hamburger- when I went to uni the only profs with meaningful industrial experience were already reaching retirement age- and the new crop of profs were all "publish or perish" academic/researcher types. I've been a volunteer instructor in a course at my alma mater for decades to provide at least a little industrial perspective that the particularly good academic prof teaching that course is entirely missing. I'm confident that this transition has happened elsewhere too.

 

[CWB1]

JME but most of the college professors I've known with a decent amount of industry experience were those who were teaching after retiring from industry. The rest typically maxed out ~10 years experience with <5 being fairly common bc in many cases they started in industry, went back to school for an advanced degree and stayed to teach. For MEs, teaching usually does involve a slight pay cut vs working but usually involves far fewer hours and also usually offers a fairly nice pension and benefits, so is well worth it to many.

 

[LRJ]

There's already a shortage, it just isn't across every industry. My generation is largely missing from the UK's power industry: the engineers are either gray-haired looking forward to retirement day, or they're relatively recent graduates. There aren't many mid-career engineers in this industry in the 40 - 50 y.o. age range because the denationalisation of the industry 30 years ago resulted in a decade-long gap in recruitment which has never been adequately filled.

I think this depends on the company you work for. I find that most of those missing middle-aged 'engineers' have tended to go down a project management route in the company I work for.

Also, given that most engineers never did work for nationalised industries, your diagnosis for this apparent shortage is highly unlikely to be true. Indeed you'd have to assume that a good chunk just left the industry completely upon privatisation, and we all know that is not what happened: the vast majority were re-employed, often in the newly-privatised companies they were given redundancy payments from; 'same old British Rail', and all that.

Nonetheless, the notion of a shortage of engineers seems to run against the evidently disappointing wages: if there was a shortage, then surely we'd be more in demand and have higher salaries? Or perhaps it's just because we're a male-dominated, fiercely competitive industry in a race to the bottom all of the time? I'm not sure what is depressing wages, but it is depressing and doesn't live up to the promises made pre-university. Sure, the work is interesting, but the wages should be better (at least here in the UK).

If there is a skills shortage then it is likely to be a good thing for those of us left in the industry. However, I don't believe there will be a skills shortage given the drive for automation in engineering - a large number of jobs will not be required in future.

 

[ScottyUK]

Generation is a niche market, and it's very probably atypical of industry at large. I should have qualified my earlier post as 'power generation' because I don't personally know what the position is on the transmission / distribution side of the industry, although from talking to friends working in our local region it doesn't sound like T&D is radically dissimilar to power generation. Are you with the Grid or one of the DNO's?

You're exactly right that a lot of the guys who left with big redundancy payments in the late 80's and early 90's set themselves up as consultants and were immediately re-employed by their former colleagues who were still on staff. Those one-man-band consultants have no staff of their own to pass on their expertise to, and indeed they have good commercial reason not to do so. The last of those guys are hitting retirement though, and as they do a massive gap in knowledge is opening up between those who are retiring and those who would be replacing them if the industry had some kind of succession planning. The power industry in the UK is dumbing down, and the industry knowledge is becoming concentrated in a few big OEM's based overseas.

 

[cranky108]

It's the same in the US, but we had no massive layoffs. But now we are seeing new people, but not engineers. The new people are compliance people who are telling us that no one ever needs to be in a substation.

I see the problem as the business people see no shortage, where as we see few qualified people. So I am guessing that the large number of unqualified people appear as there is no shortage, while we have open positions for several years because we can't find qualified people.

Sort of a disconnect in the business side and reality. In the end what do you think will happen? Say maybe large outages due to unqualified people doing the power engineering.

But it is correct that 'hard to fill' positions are not paying as well, and that maybe because most of us are not that willing to change employers.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

"But it is correct that 'hard to fill' positions are not paying as well, and that maybe because most of us are not that willing to change employers."

There are a lot of things working against power engineering wages. You basically have to move to work for another utility. It is often less of a headache for utilities to just outsource the work. It is difficult to get on a utility's bid list so a large amount of outsourced work is sourced through a very small number of consulting companies. Utilities are regulated. Some consulting companies are only maybe 20% citizen labor. There is a prevailing belief that still carries that power engineering didn't pay well so it shouldn't have to pay well, even in a shortage.

 

[Tunalover]

Guys take a look at job descriptions for even the lowest level engineering jobs. They require skills that FEW IF ANY will have. If candidates are honest and pass those positions by because there are "must haves" they don't have, the employer misses out on good people. On the other hand, those that apply anyway are sometimes rewarded even though they don't have all the "must haves". It's par for the course that employers continue to look for something for nothing. They stopped investing in training and now seek to hire only people that were trained by someone else "no assembly required". It's a lot like with security clearances. No one wants to get them for their own people when they can simply hire people who already have them. With time, cleared people will disappear. With time, highly skilled people will disappear.

ElectroMechanical Product Development
UMD 1984
UCF 1993

 

[spraytechnology]

Probably what you see are the jobs /description/ads by recruiting agencies. Often the recruting agents 'emself are clueless as what the role and skills are all about as most are not technical people to start with. Maybe they serve a market need but we would bypass them on most instances. Often such perfect jobs do not even exist.