Engineering Careers

Oooh. I bet you just opened a fire storm of abuse... There will be hundreds of posts about how there are already too many engineers, that engineering salaries are so low that no one is interested, or that US employers would rather import cheap labor from India or China.

The fact is that I have a pretty strong network, so I get contacted almost every day about engineering jobs in my field, even now in the midst of this "horrible recession" so I believe you. There is a shortage of "good help."

So now to stir the tempest:

1) Employers use these sorts of economic contractions to get rid of problem children. This is the fourth one I have experienced, it happened every time. That is not to say that engineers recently let go are not talented or smart, but the bosses will always start by getting rid or those that are a pain in the a$$. Think about that seriously people, and develop a plan to change your behavior.

2) Students in the USA (and in many other parts of the world) are too darn lazy to pursue engineering. They would rather play stupid at maths than to work hard enough to master it. Students in India and China are forced to work to learn the math, and so go on to pursue engineering. The USA is in decline because people in the USA no longer know mathematics.

Let the abuse begin!!!

We have seen this from some of our clients as well, they are taking the opportunity to dispose of problem children or trimming staff to save $$. Then they wonder why they can't get anything done.

I've said this before, but I have an older friend that says any engineer isn't worth a damn until 10 years of experience (and I mean real experience, not chasing a spreadsheet around a desk). If a company isn't willing to put that kind of effort and time into a person, then they will never have a reliable group of technical professionals.

From what I understand, there used to be a mentoring program at any large company with an engineering staff, but that is pretty much extinct now. There are people out there that are experts in their field and want to pass that knowledge on. To mentor someone in an engineering field though, I think you need to be working with them pretty much full time and they need to be passing work product through the mentor. Companies aren't willing to pay that expert nearly enough, and that expert in turn is forming a one-man/woman consulting business and his/her knowledge goes with them. Trust me, my company hires them as advisers all the time, and we in turn pass their charges on to the client.

It seems that some companies, as another poster wrote, are treating engineers similar to how you would treat someone who is home for Xmas break and wants to pick up a few bucks by folding shirts at the mall. They think, "Well, we'll just find someone." I changed jobs less than a year ago and it wasn't for money, it was because I was tired of being treated like the shirt folder.

Companies do not inspire loyalty any more and that makes it difficult to develop a person. When you trim staff to save $$ in lean times, then you should expect to have to pay major $$ to retain staff in rich times. This creates a market for technical staff, which in turn means more technical recruiters.

It's been my observation over a 42 year engineering career that American kids chose engineering education for one or more of 4 reasons.

1. The positive influence and example of Dad or someone else very close to them who likely worked in a business that employed engineers and saw engineering as a path to a better life for the kids or simply shared his enthusiasm for engineering.

2. A strong interest in some aspect of the world of technology (often a creative hobby or the influence of a great high school science experience) combined with aptitude that developed in their early teen years.

3. The view that engineering was a good and well paying career (seen through the eyes of a 19 or 20 year old having to choose a major in college.)

4. They started out of high school in a blue collar trade and what they saw there motivated them to go back to school after a few years of work (usually night courses at an urban engineering school) This was common in eastern industrial cities.

So what has changed in 50 years?

We trained two generations of engineers at the same time we allowed ourselves to dismantle much of our manufacturing base in favor of globalization. So now we have far more engineers than we need. Even as we send that first generation into retirement we continue to import engineers from Asia and Europe.

But what happened in the last 50 years is that the surplus of engineers enabled employers to use trained engineers to design, drafting, technician, administrative and clerical work. State labor laws written when engineers were high level professionals in corporations now allow companies to require engineers to work lots of unpaid overtime. As a result net engineering salaries have actually dropped below the salaries of many skilled trades.

Corporate CEO's have gotten used to the educated engineer as the ideal "jack of all trades" for staffing their companies. Few things are as sweet to a company as free labor. They also see engineers as an excellent pool of candidates from which to select future middle managers. So, of course, they want only the "best and the brightest" that survive the most rigorous sorting process that universities can contrive.

University educators love to hear this. It matters little to them that all the tenured staff that teaches the math and science of the previous century will fill the brains of students with stuff of little use in their future careers unless they plan to go to graduate school. All they need to do is sort the wheat from the chaff. As long as Mom and Dad keep the tuition flowing, their accreditation stays at the top and they graduate the kinds of winners that go on to be lavish contributors as alumni they will be happy.

What else has changed?

Our society has afluenza. Nobody wants to work hard anymore, especially at getting educated. Entitlement is the big thing.

Kids don't have creative hobbies unless they have screens, joysticks, buttons and keyboards.

Schools are deemphasizing science.

Fewer citizens have anything to do with working engineers, who popular culture has denigrated into "geeks".

Engineering societies have devolved into little more than technical publishers of information that nobody except the few technical libraries can afford to buy.

We have a patent system that is almost useless to the small business person or individual practicing engineer.

Liability insurance costs virtually prohibit engineers from working on their own.

When our media offers up information on some technical achievement the "face" of that news is invariably some scientist, business person, politician or talk show personality. Seldom or ever an engineer.

Corporations simply don't contribute money to engineering education now the way they did 50 years ago. We can thank the quarterly result imperatives of Wall Street and institutional investors for that. Neither is there anything like the GI Bill that educated thousands of engineers after WWII.

Finally, and this is the very sad part, too many of our greatest engineering achievements of the past century are viewed today in a negative light either from a safety, environmental or general societal viewpoint. How do you convince the kids of today to go for a career where they will be asked to create more of the same while most likely working for a large corporation that will view them as just another exploitable commodity?

Ed Weldon

BTW the .pdf projection engineer needs from 2006 forward 10 years to 2016 begs some credibility given the economic events of the past 10 months.

Several people have posted here some very good reasons why engineers feel under appreciated. Sadly mentoring itself can be just one of those methods. In today's corporate culture where CEOs and CFOs are getting golden parachutes for destroying long standing engineering titans (Nortel Networks, Disney) some can look at mentoring as giving up their security blanket.

In my recent quest to improve my job position after obtaining a new degree, I found a paradoxical position taken by most companies interested in my resume. While their sales propaganda always promoted a "unique" product in their industry, their quest for new engineers focused on finding the "golden child" who had been designing exactly their product for many years. They never seemed to be interested in somebody talented in another realm willing to transpose this knowledge into their realm.

I realize that this may be just my unique experience. That my recent toss into the employment improbability drive resulted in parking my brain outside of the restaurant at the end of the universe. Good thing I brought my towel with me.

Part of the problem is that the educational elites have conned the business world into believing that if you haven't learned whatever at their feet, then you couldn't possibly have learned it at all. The cost of that sheepskin is high when you consider that many of those pontificating from those hallowed halls have never actually done anything either. But that's all many companies are looking for: wall art. Never mind if there is any practical experience or aptitude.

I have seen way too many qualified individuals passed over because they didn't have the magic paper, and the company thrashes about looking for their next wizard when they already have them in the shop; but the lack of magic paper leaves them invisible to those cruising the higher plane.