Would you do it again?- Hind sight and engineering- 22

[jackboot]

I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering Degree and obtained a PE.

If someone knows the answer to this question please tell me:

Why does it seem that everyone is making the same amount of money whether one is in engineering or in some other profession?

Realize I love my profession, and I love the science behind what I do, and I watch Discovery and NOVA like most people watch a football game. But Engineering was a very hard degree to earn - my friends in other majors did not have to do half of what I did to earn their degree.

I help high school students from time to time and I am asked would you recommend engineering as a degree choice.

My answer: Only as a degree; it will provide the foundation for any other secondary education you can dream of (medicine or law). I can't bring myself to say - go engineering you will never regret it.

I find it discouraging that friends selling cell phones are making way more money than me and don't go to bed at night wondering whether their new design is going to kill or injure someone.

Plus - I was sweating out exams in college weeks in advance while everyone else was partying up to the day before.

Am I the only one with this observation?

jackboot

 

[moltenmetal]

QCE- thanks for the compliment. I'm making a good living as an engineer too- but as I've said before, I SHOULD be- and if I'm not, I'm either an idiot or our economy is totally screwed. I don't generalize my own specific good fortune or that of my friends or colleagues to the engineering population in general- I know better than to extrapolate with such limited data!

You're not the only engineer who doesn't get this point. But the numbers are totally compelling:

1991: ~6,800 CEAB-accredited Canadian engineering grads and ~ 1,300 engineering immigrants to all of Canada- and no desperate shortage of ANY kind of engineer that I'm aware of...

2001: ~8,700 CEAB-accredited Canadian engineering grads and ~ 16,800 engineering immigrants to all of Canada

Graduating rates increased by about 30% in a decade. Immigration increased TWELVE-FOLD ~ 1,100%! In the same decade, the Canadian workforce overall and our GDP grew by a net ~17-20%. Engineering supply on a yearly basis grew to THREE TIMES what it was a decade earlier!

If immigration grew at the rate that graduation did, I could see the argument that supply had kept pace with demand, or perhaps slightly exceeded it given the effects of off-shoring and improved worker productivity due to technology. An engineering work growth rate of, say, TWICE the national average for all professions, or TWICE the growth rate of our GDP, might be believable. But TEN TIMES the growth rate of the overall economy? You've got to be kidding!

I'm sure you electricals learned the same thing as we chemicals did in 1st year: input minus output equals ACCUMULATION! We know the input (supply) rate, we can estimate the output (demand) rate within at least half an order of magnitude- so we have ACCUMULATION of engineers, big time!

All the other data I've seen support this view. For instance, among 600 recent immigrant engineers surveyed by the Council for Access to the Profession of Engineering, only 20% were working as engineers- and some had been searching for jobs for several years. About 50% of these people are totally unemployed- mostly because they won't stoop to take a survival job for fear of losing their profession. Either this means Canada is a total fraud from the standpoint of multiculturalism, or there is insufficient demand for these people's skills- because I KNOW these people are looking for engineering work- I've personally met and spoken with literally hundreds of them. The previous generation of immigrant engineers didn't suffer that fate- when quotas were used to at least approximately match supply and demand, the marketplace wasn't massively oversupplied and people FOUND WORK.

In 1991, some CEAB grads left the profession to find other jobs, just like your friends- some by choice, some because they couldn't find work in their field that was worth doing for the pay offered. Some of the immigrants did the same. So what? They did the same thing in 2001- in fact, more of them did- most of them because of frustration in trying to find suitable engineering work! I've met lots of angry, frustrated, broke recent grads who wonder why the hell they went into engineering in the first place- and lots of desperate immigrants as I mentioned before.

If we honestly believe that engineering is "the new liberal arts education" as a stepping stone to other professions and types of work, and that most engineering students really have no intention to work as engineers, ever, then we'd better shout this from the rooftops of the universities before these poor kids sign up for four+ years of hell! And if we feel that these immigrant engineers should be satisfied with factory work or driving taxis once they come to Canada, we'd better be dead clear with them UP FRONT- long before they choose to come here!

We're not advocating closing the borders or shutting down the engineering schools- all we want is ACCURATE, TIMELY discipline- and region-specific data so people can make informed choices. Our country will always need SOME engineers, and will reward SOME engineers richly for their essential services. But that's no reason to flood the marketplace- it accomplishes nothing for Canada aside from pushing down salaries and working conditions for ALL engineers here- and it creates tragedies in people's lives!

 

[HgTX]

If it's four years of hell, they shouldn't be doing it either.

Hg

 

[QCE]

Moltenmetal

Do you think these people would immigrate to Canada even if they were told personnally by you that they would have a tough time finding a job as an engineer?

I'm willing to bet that they were not happily working in their former country as happily employed engineers and then someone came and told them to come to Canada the land of milk and honey. I think you need to also examine why most of these people are coming to Canada.

I hope you are working with the APEGO people to spread the word. If the problem can be worked out I hope it will be.