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]

It's the old Catch-22; "you have no experience, so we are reluctant to hire you," and we don't particularly see it as our problem that you can't get experience unless you've been hired in the past.

The constant drumbeat of the STEM crisis has increased the student enrollment in STEM disciplines by 50%, and now, the only way to weed down the applicant pool is to tally the number of internships acquired.

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[Tunalover]

IRStuff the hyperlink you provided to the IEEE article doesn't work. I'd love to read it!


H. Bruce Jackson
ElectroMechanical Product Development
UMD 1984
UCF 1993

 

[IRstuff]

Sorry, I half suspected that dangling hyphen would be problem. Link

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[nonplussed]

This problem is not only in the US. The same is happening in Australia. While engineers struggle to find jobs, the body which is meant to represent engineers, Engineers Australia, lobbies the government to keep engineers on the skills shortage list. It's not hard to understand why when you see that 20% of Engineers Australia revenue is from migration assessment. It is a huge money maker for them.

 

[spraytechnology]

Australia,,, yes I believe the graph is accurate, since 2013 the engineering vacancies dropped with few exceptions. Most of heavy manufacturing closed shop and getting a well paying engineering job is now somewhat of a challenge. ( I am currently employed on a resource project overseas). Nevertheless I could never understand why in Cananda and Australia would be migrants with engineering qualifications would migrate on that basis while clearly most of them will never make it or find a job in engineering. Am I missing something here?

 

[MFJewell]

Nevertheless I could never understand why in Cananda and Australia would be migrants with engineering qualifications would migrate on that basis while clearly most of them will never make it or find a job in engineering.

Because even if they end up as a cab driver, it is still mostly like a much better life than whatever third world country they came from.

 

[moltenmetal]

Many engineers who migrate to Canada are successful in landing engineering employment, achieving licensure and having fully successful integration into the engineering labour market.

Many more never achieve that success, or only achieve it partially or only for a time.

I would say that with the possible exception of refugees and asylum seekers, all of them come in the sincere hope and belief that Canada is a land of limitless opportunity and their success, while not certain, is reasonably probable.

The statistics would tend to give them reasons to shake their heads and re-think things a bit.

The reason the immigrant engineers aren't achieving even the pathetic conversion of engineering education into engineering labour force participation in Canada that the average Canadian graduate achieves isn't as a result of racism or xenophobia in my view. Canada and Canadians, on average, have an overwhelmingly and somewhat uncritically positive view of immigration in normative terms, though racists and xenophobes both general and selective do exist here as they do everywhere in the world. Rather, immigrant engineers fail in huge numbers here because they are often viewed by employers as an unnecessarily high "hire risk"- a risk which it isn't worth taking unless the labour market is actually tight enough that they have no choice. Given that the labour market for engineering here in Canada is by no means tight, nor has it been even close to tight for a very long time. There is a perennial shortage of people with 10 yrs of local experience who were not hired as fresh grads ten years prior in that industry, but that's a role that many immigrants to Canada cannot be reasonably expected to fill right out of the airport arrivals gate.

 

[IRstuff]

"they are often viewed by employers as an unnecessarily high "hire risk"-"

This seems worth exploring; why do you think there's a perceived risk? If anything, one would think that immigrants would pose a lower job-hopping risk, or is it some other risk?

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[drawoh]

moltenmetal,

I am sitting here in an office in Kitchener/Waterloo, and it appears to me that most of the engineers here graduated from the nearby and well regarded University of Waterloo. Obviously, if you were trained in India, Russia or China, you are not a Waterloo graduate, and your resume will move down the stack. Lots of Waterloo graduates are New Canadians. Even if you cannot break into engineering, your kids can.

--
JHG

 

[canwesteng]

You'd expect better communication and language skills from local grads than immigrants from countries where English is not the primary language - also, local grads are generally more likely to be a cultural fit.

 

[CheckerHater]

Rather, immigrant engineers ... viewed by employers as ... a risk which it isn't worth taking unless the labour market is actually tight enough that they have no choice.

Who exactly has no choise, employers or employees?

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

 

[cranky108]

How exactly do you complete a background check on someone from Russia or China?

Would it not be easy to hire someone from the university down the street?

It would be different if you were hiring someone to cut your lawn (Have you ever run over your own foot? Do you know better than to attempt to cut grass after it has rained?).

 

[spraytechnology]

Makes a lot of sense to hire a fresh graduate from a university down the road, sometimes, but why would be immigrants with lets say 10 years engineering experience bet all and drive taxis instead.? after passing the hurdles of certification and recognition...looks more like a high level scheme to boost bodies, drive labor cost down, increase consumption and real estate values basically driving growth at the expense of the immigrants which are given a ...dream...
I Australia they have a working visa 457 that is heavily abused by businesses to bring in cheaper labor....

How do you do a background check on a company ? You remind me about the Canadian mining co called Bre-x....

The reality is the universities are pumping out graduates (business sense) to an ever shrinking engineering market that mostly shifted to low cost countries and emerging economies...

 

[moltenmetal]

Let's compare two job candidates, shall we?

The first graduated from a local university and has ten years working in the local market- five for one of your competitors, another five for one of your suppliers. They have references that you know personally- maybe even people on your own staff, and others you can get on the phone in five minutes. They come in familiar with both your suppliers and some of your customers, have a professional engineering license in your area, and already have a line on a couple potential projects they may be able to bring in with them either now or in the near future.

The other graduated in another country and studied in a language other than your local language- one of ten thousand such programs and universities/colleges in the world, about which you personally know absolutely nothing. They have the same ten years- or even twenty years- worth of experience, but all of it was gained in another part of the world where the codes and standards of practice are similarly either incompletely known or totally unknown to you. They pass a technical test for basic technical skills and seem to know their stuff, but communication is a bit of a struggle . They're eager, and willing to work for $10,000 or even $20,000 less per year than the other person- this year at least. They have no license yet, because they lack the year's worth of local mentored experience necessary to get one.

Which of the two would you consider to be a greater hire risk?

The latter candidate is a reasonable composite of at least 100 foreign trained engineers I've interviewed over the past couple of decades- at least the ones who met the basic technical competency requirements (which some local engineers also fail).

If the former candidate doesn't present themselves for an interview or is somehow imperfect, you may choose the latter. If you have ten of the former stacked up in the resume file because the labour market is saturated, you're not even going to interview people in the latter category.

Is the exclusion of those foreign-trained engineers from consideration "discrimination"? Selecting which candidates to interview and which interviewees to hire is FUNDAMENTALLY a process of discrimination. The key is to ensure that the discrimination isn't happening on the basis of grounds not materially affecting job performance. Race, country of origin, sex/orientation etc. are such grounds- but communication skills, work experience in the local milieu, access to local references etc.- those are NOT arbitrary grounds, they're meaningful selection criteria because they can be demonstrated to have a meaningful effect on actual job performance, especially initial job performance. Generally, you're hiring experienced people to fill an immediate need- team-building over the longer term can be done with more junior staff who obviously are going to be selected from the local pool of graduates.

We've had good luck with some foreign-trained engineers- some of them really exceptional- but we've also had some spectacularly bad hires who cost us a lot of money to regret. By far, our best luck has been with co-op students who we've mentored and trained ourselves. They represent near zero hire risk- we can say that now that many of them are still on our staff after over 10 yrs on the job.

What saddens me even more is that many immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers come to Canada knowingly sacrificing their career aspirations for the benefit of their kids' futures- and then put their kids into engineering schools, whereupon the grads are dumped onto an oversupplied local labour market and forgotten about- expected to sink or swim on their own merits, despite the oversupply. It's ridiculous.

 

[IRstuff]

Oh, OK, I see that more as part of the rack & stack, compare/contrast, process of selecting the best candidate for the job/price. Nevertheless, employers know that having these immigrant engineers tossed into the applicant pool will drag down salaries, since, as you indicate, there are a few highly qualified foreign engineers at a lower wage that could displace a few highly paid local engineers.

The only reason US wages have finally started upward the past year is because the unemployment rate is now so low and Trump and his minions have snarled immigration. That helps us, but I don't think that's what his big money donors wanted.

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[MFJewell]

The only reason US wages have finally started upward the past year is because the unemployment rate is now so low and Trump and his minions have snarled immigration. That helps us, but I don't think that's what his big money donors wanted.

Wage increases have been possible during the previous administration's reign. I increased my wages 110% from 2010 to 2017.

 

[cranky108]

I've also had wage increases because of a shortage in my area.

Yes I get it that universities don't teach much in the power area. I also have to say those grads who think it is easy, and you just follow the book, are wrong, and find mid life that they have worn out their welcome at so many places (job hoppers we call them).

And that is a limit in this industry, you can't assume the books are 100% right. You have to think out side the box, and many grads have not learned that, and can't do that.

Maybe that's the need for excess engineers. People who can do it, and people who washout. Maybe the universities need to make the education harder so some people wash out sooner.

 

[moltenmetal]

Employers absolutely love to have a full stack of applicants for every position they advertise. They love high supply- it makes for a "flexible" workforce- read one that is cowed, and willing to put up with lousy pay and poor working conditions- contracts for nothing more than they'd normally pay as salary for instance.

Every chance they get, employers will scream "shortage!" at the top of their lungs.

Ironically, their short-term thinking actually generates real shortages- of the people with ten years of experience that their field didn't hire as fresh grads ten years prior. Equally regrettably, those positions aren't easily filled by immigrants either- they don't fit the bill completely for the reasons mentioned in my previous post.

 

[IRstuff]

I was referring to the economy as a whole, which is what the Fed is looking at as well, hence, the rate hikes in the last two years.

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[spraytechnology]

moltenmetal, I have to agree with your comments and that the way things are. Although you use pompous terms like high risk hires etc...although I think foreign engineers tend to be more flexible, humble and willing to adapt and less likely to rock the boat. Terminating for cause an employee if done by law should not be an issue, and that is part of doing business. In USA it is less of an issue but in Canada, Australia etc since the markets are saturated, the engineering business turns into somewhat a closed shop.