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

 

[moltenmetal]

truckandbus: you mean the smarter kids are waking up and smelling the cat food? Moving to gigs which give them more reward for less effort and risk? The little rascals- how dare they?

There's some attrition out of the profession to SNORGY's favourite MBA route, for sure. That shows up in the numbers- a somewhat larger % of eng grads are employed as engineers 0-10 yrs post grad than in the upper years of experience. Some of that attrition though occurs when people are let go from a cyclic industry and not picked up as engineers thereafter- that too happens.

 

[Maui]

Based on my own experience the ones who migrate to the MBA programs tend to be the least competent. I worked directly for one of these imbeciles several years ago, and he couldn't engineer his way out of a paper bag. He ended up being a VP and got to make the call on engineering decisions. It was ugly...

Maui

 

[davefitz]

Maui,
It proves the old saying" the people with a B average work for the government, and the people with the A average work for the people with a C average".

"...when logic, and proportion, have fallen, sloppy dead..." Grace Slick

 

[snarkysparky]

Can't be a shortage of employees, only a shortage of willingness to pay more.

 

[Maui]

Dave, I'd never heard that before, but it sounds about right.

 

[moltenmetal]

OK, you're right- I forgot to put "smarter" in quotation marks...what I meant is the ones who leave for greener pastures by choice a) aren't so in love with engineering that they see it as an avocation rather than merely something they do for money (you're right- often, that's because they aren't all that good at it), and b) they're the ones who wake up and realize that engineering, especially as an employee, isn't nearly as good a gig as it was thirty years ago, and if you really want to earn some money you've got to find another way to do it. Median pay in Ontario for an experienced (level D) engineer is now on par with the median pay of teachers in the province.

 

[SPDL310]

Wow. Moltenmetal that salary statistic is brutal. No wonder engineering grads are jumping ship. With wages that low less technical low pressure jobs with similar pay will always win over all but the most dedicated, unless pay dramatically increases with experience.

 

[IRstuff]

There are only two parts to that equation; supply and demand.

Take one guess why some people are so eager to bump up the supply of engineers.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529

 

[drawoh]

moltenmetal,

Teachers in Ontario are reasonably well paid, although engineers don't get the summer off.

Anatomy of an Ontario teacher’s paycheque .

Remember of course, that these are Canadian dollars.

--
JHG

 

[WARose]

I've heard this one before.....and at the bottom of it is typically a shortage of cheap engineers.

 

[moltenmetal]

My argument isn't that teachers are overpaid here- I think they earn fair compensation, particularly when they (inevitably) reach the top end of the pay scale. BTW, the top end of the payscale IS the median now, because more than 1/2 of the teachers in Ontario have achieved the top of the payscale. They don't retire, even when they can and should- my son received more instructional hours in gr 6 from a 70 yr old "retired" principal who was "double dipping" as a long term occasional teacher (long term substitute). He's obviously been doing this for a long time, and getting away with it as a result of the collective bargaining agreement, while gifted young teachers like my niece just starting out cannot get a board position and languish on the LTO list for YEARS...

My question is simply this: IF we feel as a society that a teacher is worth their (equivalent of, once holidays are compensated for) $100,000 CDN/yr PLUS excellent benefits (the best defined benefit pension plan in the country- even federal employees don't have it that good!), is a similarly experienced engineer not worth more than that? The market at the moment says "no", as evident from the salaries of engineers relative to teachers, but ONLY because teachers are unionized and engineers for the most part are not.

 

[Sanikapatel]

I think there will be time when many extra field will come into picture and engg would get any importance. No jobs for engg have to do some extra and try for many more extra degrees...

Sanika Patel

http://crbtech.in/CAD-CAM-Training/

 

[cranky108]

I propose that if the US imports enough engineers, that the quality of engineers in other parts of the world will decrease. The same with doctors, and taxi drivers.

So from that a point of view, it might be better for us to import as many engineers as possible.

I also propose that there will be enough engineering grads that just can't cut it, and will become teachers.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

https://dazeinfo.com/2014/10/28/1-5...-india-every-year-fewer-getting-hired-trends/

http://www.thenewsminute.com/lives/609

And there are tons of articles about industry screaming how inadequate fresh graduates and that is why they hire only a small fraction:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...ployable-says-survey/articleshow/38438996.cms

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826

Same stuff as in the states. Fresh grads suck. Nevermind that they need training. Only a fraction of fresh grads go into engineering. Wages are stagnate despite industry's cry that there is a shortage. I am not really convinced the quality anywhere is affected that much by workers leaving to work abroad. The glut is too large for quality or wages to be affected much by people leaving the country in my opinion.

 

[IRstuff]

Should hardly be surprising; every developing country is attempting to corner the world's markets in engineered goods, but it also requires very cheap labor, so all the more reason to pump up the supply to bring the labor costs down.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529

 

[cranky108]

I believe it is part of the over all trend to reduce labor costs by bring in more supply of labor. That I don't disagree.

But there also seems to be a shortage of quality power engineers. And Tech.'s, and Linemen, and truck drivers.

For that matter, there is a shortage of quality people available.

 

[IRstuff]

"For that matter, there is a shortage of quality people available."

That's because they're already gainfully employed. The big question is whether we're at the point where any further increases in supply of quality people will drastically drop labor rates, because not every job requires the "best" candidate. Someone who is "good enough" will undercut the salary rates.

In some respects, all this emphasis on driving people into STEM is a lot like an external market manipulation, which we all know has potentially deleterious consequences.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529

 

[CheckerHater]

I propose that if the US imports enough engineers, that the quality of engineers in other parts of the world will decrease.

Don't you think that if US will import cheap engineers, the quality of engineers in other parts of the world will actually increase?

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future

 

[spraytechnology]

I have 20 plus engineering work experience to senior,principal and manager level. My view is that there is no shortage of engineers and will never be mainly to do with globalization and mass migration. In fact, I am well aware of universities in various countries closing down or consolidating departments as are not able to recruit engineering candidates.

 

[ScottyUK]

The UK is seeing a similar problem in the heavy electrical industries - power generation, transmission, primary distribution and the process industries such as petrochemicals and... well, once I could have included mining, steel, and the like. Not now, not today.

There is an entire generation which is under-represented in power engineering - the one I'm part of. It's the 30-year harvest from the seeds sown during the privatisation (read: decimation) of the state-owned utilities in the 1980's and the recession of the late 80's and early 90's. Recruitment and training pretty much stopped for two decades before the power industry started to wake up and realise that a serious problem was developing, with the result that my generation is largely missing from an industry still dominated by the 'grey haired guys' who survived the huge cull. During that period many universities closed their unpopular power engineering classes because they were (rightly) seen by students as difficult, old-fashioned, and with lousy employment prospects, while the universities saw them as space-hungry, capital-intensive, minority-interest subjects.

Today a handful of universities have re-established first-rate power engineering schools and there are some really bright prospects coming out of these universities who will be excellent engineers once they gain industry experience, but they can't pick up two or three decades worth of experience overnight, and the old-timers are retiring faster than these new folks are gaining experience. I see this going on for another decade, maybe fifteen years or so until some sort of balance between supply and demand is restored. At that point I'll be getting worried that some of these new grads will be a lot better at this stuff than I am.