The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage 6

[spciesla]

http://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/

Long article, but here are a couple of my favorite snippets.

"Were there to be a genuine shortage at present, there would be evidence of employers raising wage offers to attract the scientists and engineers they want. But the evidence points in the other direction: Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations."

"Labor markets for scientists and engineers also differ geographically. Employer demand is far higher in a few hothouse metropolitan areas than in the rest of the country, especially during boom periods. Moreover recruitment of domestic professionals to these regions may be more difficult than in others when would-be hires discover that the remuneration employers are offering does not come close to compensating for far higher housing and other costs."

 

[cranky108]

That's great, but in the area of power engineers there are shortages. Not because of a shortage of electrical engineers, but because of a shortage of universitys offering power classes.

Hard to believe a 50+ engineer could walk into any of a dozen utilities and be hired. Also positions available as auditor if I wanted to travel.
Not a lot of engineering jobs like that. I am also seeing retirees being hired for temp workload, because there are no job shoppers in this area.

The story of shortages seems to exist only in a few specilities, and wages aren't going up because the current population with that specility don't want to be that moble.

So I see these stories as part of the picture, and the proposed solutions as part of an answer. But in no way is this the whole story, and proposed soltions are not the whole answer.

In general, there are more engineers than we have positions for. But in some specialties there is a shortage, and that can't be fixed by bringing people from somewhere else.
What needs to happen is companies need to step up with internal training programs, but budgets won't allow that to happen on a large enough scale.

 

[moltenmetal]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an-ongoing-discussion

In case you didn't see this excellent article- well worth a read. There's big money in pretending that there'll be a shortage on the horizon. These folks have been crying "wolf" since the 30s. The sidebar has a quote from someone famous predicting an imminent shortage, in every decade since the 1930s...

As to recruiting in remote locations: professionals tend to marry other professionals, not all of whom are in "portable" professions like teaching and medicine/nursing. Providing a job for one spouse ain't gonna cut it.

The only shortage their is, if there is any shortage, is a shortage of people who weren't hired into particular fields 10 years ago as fresh grads. That's not a shortage, that's a succession-planning problem.

 

[Maui]

The only shortage I see are the number of people telling the truth in the ranks of the news media, government, and industry: that there is no shortage of employable STEM candidates.

Employers don't seem to be interested in training anybody these days because it takes time and costs money. This means that you have to invest in your employees in order to get the benefits from that investment. It's much easier to let some other company pay for that and then cherry pick the people you want. Then you don't have to invest anything in training and your new employees can be expected to work productively from day 1. Ideally these companies want people with 10 to 15 years of relevant work experience, because they are relatively young so they don't expect to be paid too much, they are on average healthier than the older members of the work force which translates to lower health care costs, and they would be expected to be more productive. Employers want to have enough of these candidates readily available so that they don't have to offer significant wage increases in order to hire them. And if they fear this might be the case in the next few years, they yell SHORTAGE to get college enrollments up. And clueless students take the bait, not realizing that in four years they'll be saddled with a massive amount of college debt and no job prospects. And they will still be hearing the siren call from government and industry of SHORTAGE.

Some of these guys are real bastards.

Maui

http://www.EngineeringMetallurgy.com

 

[Comcokid]

Far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad. (from the article)

That sums up the electronics side of Electrical Engineering the past decade.

Today, employers are so specific about job qualifications that only a "purple squirrel" who will work for mininum wage need apply.

 

[AELLC]

In structural, I think we went thru a phase of offshoring work, but much of that didn't work out. That may be the one good things about our absurdly over-complicated Codes.

 

[FeX32]

Bastards indeed! I am one of those misled engineering grads.

I am passionate about STEM, but I think they also need to teach their students some "soft" skills that businesses like, as well as how to market themselves. Even if you are a tech genius, the guy with the bigger smile or friend on the inside has a much better chance.

To get back on track..
It's amazing how many engineers I meet in Ontario that don't do engineering. ...


"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." L. da Vinci
- Gian

 

[zdas04]

I finished up a week-long course in Unconventional Gas Upstream Engineering on Friday and got the course evaluations. The most-repeated complaint was that the exercises were too hard. That is always the most repeated complaint. Most of the class was new facilities Engineers in their first year out of University. One of the exercises was to take the closed form flow equations and a set of conditions and pick one of the equations as the most appropriate for that set of data (the flow stream had 8% CO2, etc.). The slide before the exercise said "The Weymouth Equation made the assumption that there was no CO2 in the flow when they did their correlation". Time required to eliminate that equation should have been 10 seconds. The slide before the Weymouth slide mentions that Panhandle A is only valid in a narrow Reynolds number range--should have taken a couple of minutes to calculate Reynolds Number and eliminate that one. Another 5 minutes to plot the conditions on the Moody diagram and eliminate AGA Fully Turbulent. They should have been calculating the flow rate with the Isothermal Gas Flow Equation within 10 minutes of starting. At 40 minutes one group finally figured out the answer (the rest didn't get quite that far).

These folks are really "doing Engineering" in their day jobs, but they have been so ingrained in University that "all necessary parameters will be in the problem statement and there will be no irrelevant parameters in the problem statement" that even simplified real-world problems are beyond their ability to set up. One guy read through the problem statement on every exercise. Got a disgusted look on his face. Went for a smoke. Every time. I finally asked him why he wasn't attempting to set the problems up and he replied "what's the point, the answers are always in the back of the book". He didn't buy my "I don't care about the destination, I'm interested in the journey" line.

My contention is that the only way you can get an oversupply of Engineers is if you have lowered the standard to acquire that title to the point where too many of the practitioners can't set up an Engineering problem and you need 3-4 times as many to do any task so that maybe you'll get one critical thinker.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[AELLC]

I was in a situation once when I was an employee and I had to teach non-degreed drafting technicians how to do structural engineering - not that I was proud of that, but it was either do it or quit your job - that caused all kind of interesting results, mostly OMG I hope this guy doesn't screw things up, oy vey!

The worst part was this was made possible by using computer software. Ugh. 30 years earlier and this corporate-money-generating-venture would have been unthinkable and impossible to implement.

 

[beej67]

Interesting article I just recently stumbled across...

http://pando.com/2014/03/22/reveale...ns-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[moltenmetal]

FeX32: 2006 stats were that around 30% of engineering grads in Canada were actually working as engineers. In fact, if you add up all those who were working as "engineers", "engineering managers" or "engineering inspectors", that amounted to only 36% of engineering grads in 2006. By 2011, that proportion fell to 31%...So if you didn't meet a whole slew of people with engineering degrees who weren't working as engineers, THAT would be the surprise.

 

[FeX32]

Indeed moltenmetal. Luckily the general employment level of someone with an engineering education is good.

However, I sometimes feel that if our system was more like the german one we would be better off in some ways.
Their universities have strong connections to industry and many times their students have specialized training for companies that have connections with their university. This, of course, makes attaining an engineering job after graduation quite simple.


"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." L. da Vinci
- Gian

 

[JohnRBaker]

There are some examples of Industry and University program which are both intended to enhance the educational experience of primarily undergraduate engineering students as well as provide access to learning what companies are expecting and what the opportunities are in certain industries.

One such program which I'm intimately familiar with is something called P.A.C.E. (Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education) initiated by General Motors and which has attracted several partners to the program, Siemens being one of them.

For some information about this program, please go to:

http://pacepartners.org/

For a list of the P.A.C.E. partners, go to:

http://pacepartners.org/partners.php

And for a list of participating universities, go to:

http://pacepartners.org/institutions.php

Now, I would hope to think that this isn't the only such program out there. If any of you are aware of others, perhaps it would be of interest if you would post what you know as well.

And then of course, we have our own corporate initiatives when it comes to supporting academic organizations:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/academic/partners/

Again, I'm sure that many companies have initiatives like this, particularly those who can provide not only monetary support but also technology and tools that can be used by schools to support their engineering programs.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[moltenmetal]

Actually FeX32, an engineering grad is about as likely to be unemployed 6 months or 2 years after grad as the average university graduate, so there goes that theory. The employment prospects in general for engineering grads are not all that good here, and there's a simple reason: we're generating far more of them than the economy could possibly use. It's true in other professions here too, but worst in engineering by far. In fact there are substantially more teaching grads working as teachers than there are engineering grads working as engineers, and teaching is massively oversupplied.

 

[cranky108]

Just maybe the university piece of paper just isen't enough. And maybe that fact needs to be made known and clear.

And maybe students should be asking for stats on former grads ability to find a job. After all trade schools seem proud to state that over 90% of there grads are employed in the industry they study in.
Why aren't universities making such statments? Why don't universities have to compete for students, and why is it assumed the piece of paper is all that is required to get a job?

I must admit I have a little distain here for some of what happens at universities, because most have sports programs and require masive injections of money from the state. The few privite universities don't have sports teams and still manage to operarte. Maybe the business grads from privite universities are better at money managment than at public universities. And just maybe the same can be said for there engineering grads. And maybe that's why public universities don't advertise there grads sucesses and failures.

So maybe both sides of this debate are true. There maybe enough engineering grads, but not enough of quality.

 

[FeX32]

moltenmetal,
I understand your conjecture is well thought out. I am not disputing it.
It just discerns me that the universities are not making this more clear. Also, it seems the GTA has one of highest engineering job densities in Canada.
I wonder how much this varies by discipline. As I understand it, Chemical Engineering, although being one of the highest paid, has one of the lowest job prospects. I may be incorrect though.

John,
That is useful information. I know faculty at some of this uni's. Also, companies like Siemens are great for putting in the effort for this type of training.




"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." L. da Vinci
- Gian

 

[Gumpmaster]

My alma mater's (primarily an engineering university) placement rate was 96% for the class of 2012, the most recent one with data available. I was only required to take a couple of soft classes when I was there. Very heavy technically, but that's the focus of the university. They also have a heavy industry presence doing collabrative research. It was a very small private university.

The university I went to for my Masters degree was a large state school. Their approach was more do all things for all people. Their placement rate is anecdotaly a lot lower.

Maybe the Canadians should attend technical U.S. universities and triple their placement rate.

 

[moltenmetal]

The "placement rate" is a rubbish statistic, as anyone who gets a job of any kind, or who goes on to post-grad studies, has been "placed". It completely ignores under-employment, whether that be part-time or employment in a field for which they are over-qualified by education. In fact, you can use the rates of post-grad enrollment as an indicator of employment prospects for grads- when they can't find work, they go back for more schooling in the hope that this will make them more employable.

If I recall the Council of Ontario Universities study data correctly, the "placement rate" for engineering grads after two years is about 93-94% averaged over all Ontario universities, which was about the same for engineering grads as for the average university graduate from all programs- so much for the notion that eng grads are greatly more "employable" than others... The rate is just a little better than the nominal overall unemployment rate, which of course is a garbage statistic because it ignores those who have given up looking for work etc. All these stats mean is that a kid who graduates with student loans has to be doing SOMETHING after two years to keep body and soul together.

 

[cranky108]

Good point that stats can be faked. Have any suggestions?

That's the problem, members of the liers club are all over the place.

And another problem is the number of people who drop-out of engineering school, with student loans. Maybe some of them should have never been enrolled in the first place.
It seems to be a grab the money before they relize type of system (maybe that's another part of goverment that shoulden't be trusted).

 

[JohnRBaker]

(maybe that's another part of goverment that shoulden't be trusted)

As if the private universities and so-called, for-profit 'trade-schools' and colleges aren't doing their part in impoverishing a generation of students.

DISCLAIMER: Our middle son is an instructor at one of these for-profit schools, in this case 'Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts'. Note that I paid for his Bachelors Degree in Psychology that he got at Cal-State Fullerton but he paid for the culinary degree he got at the 'Culinary Institute of America at Greystone', although I did co-sign for his student loan, which he paid-off years ago (thank God).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.