<p>On yahoo and CNN front pages, they always say that there is a shortage of engineers. However, they seem very confused about the job market. For example, they say that the most valuable major that would pay you back the most in terms of job prospects and pay is "biomedical engineering". That may be true at the graduate level, but employers very rarely hire biomedical engineers if there are engineers who majored in something else because biomedical engineers lack the foundations to do engineering. </p>
<p>On the comments of these articles, people who have obtained engineering degrees explain their disappointment: they can't find jobs even though they have good soft skills and decent GPAs. </p>
<p>Also on the web are some articles that describe the incentives of the industry to spread the myth of shortage of engineers: to increase the supply of engineers so they could lower the pay to hire them. Also, that it is just a show to push congress to allow more H1B visas. It is estimated that there are 1.6 times more people who hold engineering degrees than there are engineering jobs.</p>
<p>Also adding to the troubles of engineers in this job market are the increasing number of H1B visas and outsourcing.</p>
<p>So from your experiences from the most recent 5 years or so, is the shortage of engineers a myth? How hard is it to find engineering jobs? Also, how often are engineers laid off? Do they get laid off after completing each project, or does the industry still believe in keeping long term engineering staff?</p>
<p>Depends on the particular engineering field. CS, jobs are very abundant for anyone who isn’t completely incompetent. IE, jobs are out there and you’ll probably get one, but it’s still a long process. There’s no major imbalance of supply and demand. Other engineering majors like Civil will have far more job seekers than jobs.</p>
<p>It’s not impossible to find a job as an engineer, but from what I’ve seen it definitely is an employers’ market right now. </p>
<p>One factor that hardly gets mentioned but that is nevertheless very important is that technology is becoming more and more efficient over time. A lot of the time, this means that engineers simply aren’t as necessary as they were before because less engineers can do the job than before. This is of course a very common occurrence (technology always gets better), but the other important factor is the recent recession - it’s easier to perform layoffs during periods of “economic hardship.”</p>
This is based on three factors: Employment rates, management statements, and skilled-worker visas. The first point suggests a shortage because the employment rates for engineers are better than for other professions, suggesting higher than average demand (which is then interpreted as “shortage”). The second does not include hard numbers and is tempered by the unstated caveat that the managers are looking for engineers with specific characteristics (skill sets, or security clearances, or wage requirements, for example) that may not be fulfilled simply by training more engineers. The third is tied to the second point, in that the reasons for requesting visas is often unrelated to the sheer number of engineers and is more about relative costs and similar issues, but still seems to indicate a shortage.</p>
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And yet overall employment numbers for engineers aren’t that bad, suggesting that to me that the commenters represent a vocal minority who either have some pretty bad luck or are not offering an honest self-assessment.</p>
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Honestly not sure. I think there probably IS a shortage, but it is so tied to specific requirements that you addressing engineering as a whole will not change anything.</p>
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That varies by industry and company. For example, the aerospace industry was notorious for hiring AeroE’s for projects and then booting them, and the defense industry often has little choice but to hire and fire with the needs of the nation. Most companies try hard to maintain a long-term staff, if only to keep techniques and methods in-house, and use short-term hires only for certain high-volume times.</p>
<p>is it really hard to find a job? that really depends on the person, their specialty and where they are… some thinks is easy, others find it really hard.</p>
<p>is there a shortage? I highly doubt so, considering people are retiring later in life and more people graduated from engineering and more immigration of engineers. </p>
<p>And biomedical engineering has no shortage at all. if there is a shortage then they will start hiring bachelors of biomedical.</p>
<p>I think the bottom line here is that you shouldn’t study engineering based on hopes of good job opportunities. Engineering has intense academics, and it is hard to endure if you don’t like it.</p>
<p>I disagree about picking a major based upon good job opportunities. It only makes sense to pick something you like AND has good employment potential. I think the employment opportunities for a mechanical engineer are better than a herpetologist—but I could be wrong.</p>
<p>But Kldat1, no major really has good employment opportunities except for Engineering or computer science. To have both good employment prospects AND like what you are studying is almost impossible unless you are one of the few to be born with the “knack” or something like that.</p>
<p>Job and career prospects vary based on industry and economic cycles. CS is great now, but was not about ten to twelve years ago. Civil engineering was hurting badly in the most recent downturn associated with a real estate and construction crash.</p>
<p>It seems unfair that engineers slave through school because they get lied to about the demand in the field, just to come out with debt and unemployment.</p>
<p>Engineering, like many other professions, has it’s employment cycles. Engineering is also a very broad field with many sub-fields. When a company is looking for an engineer in field X and only finds Y type engineers, the company will report a shortage of engineers. Those with Y backgrounds see a glut of engineers.</p>
<p>The 4 year lag between entering college and graduating also can skew things. It did for me but I was able to twist my degree around into a job in another field of engineering.</p>
<p>I would argue that engineering as a profession is more cyclic than other professions - and not just because of the economy. Engineers get hired for a project, get paid well until the project is finished, and then get laid off when the projection is finished. The engineer then must find another job, and the cycle repeats. Other professions tend to be linear (start off with low pay, and progress up the ladder), while the profession of engineering is cyclic by nature, regardless of the economy, changed demand in certain fields, etc. I believe this is one of the reasons why engineers have such high starting salaries. </p>
<p>The shortage is in perceived business skills that are largely NOT taught in college. Sure, there is a shortage of Informatica developers (heavy IT) but only because it is a very arcane tool that nobody has a prayer of figuring out. So, we outsource and hope for the best.</p>
<p>A friend who’s looking for a job told me about a job he was interviewed for. ONE person to do all this:</p>
<p>Knowledge of PLCs and manufacturing equipment, data collection systems for food manufacturing, SQL Server, and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). These are two disjoint skill sets and little chance of finding the purple squirrel. Yet the job has been unfilled for months because the idiot employer thinks they’ll find someone who knows PLC’s and SSRS. </p>
This happens to everyone - even philosophy majors get told that their degree will somehow lead to employment! And (as I noted above) if you set the anecdotes aside for the moment, engineering not only has a better employment rate than basically all other college majors, that employment rate has been pretty good even in a bad economy!</p>
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No.</p>
<p>Hiring people is expensive. Training people is expensive. Most projects at most companies are very similar to future and past projects at the same companies, which means that if you have designed something for them in the past you are probably a good choice to design something for them in the future - you are already familiar with the concepts and practices!</p>
<p>The only industry I have known of that practices what you are talking about is (or was) the aerospace industry - big airframes aren’t designed that often, so a new plane might require a large team of AeroE’s for a couple of years, after which they shuffle off to some other company. But that sort of practice is notable for being an exception, not the rule.</p>
I’ve seen many posts on this site talking about engineering demand cycles. I don’t think cycles is an accurate description for the referenced events, as they are more related to a market corrections triggered from unique external events that are not expected to repeat at regular intervals. </p>
<p>The issues with CS 10-12 years ago relates to the dot com bubble. Shortly after the Internet birth and expansion in the late 90s, tech became overvalued to ridiculous levels, with the NASDAQ tech index roughly quintupling. One of the best performing mutual fund managers during this period was a monkey named Raven (top 0.3%) who picked stocks by throwing darts on names of tech companies. It was difficult to not to do well with tech stocks. A market correction was inevitable. During the market correction of the early 2000s, many tech companies went under, and the demand for tech jobs decreased. After the correction, the NASDAQ returned to expected levels based on it’s historical growth rate. I wouldn’t call this event a “cycle,” nor would I assume it is going to happen again at any sort of regular interval.</p>
<p>The other referenced event with civil engineers a few years ago relates to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Home buyers were permitted to take out high-risk (based on DTI), large loans, increasing home prices to ridiculous levels in many markets. In my town, the median sales price roughly tripled during this period to ~$900k. Many home owners were permitted to take out home equity loans against the increased value of their home, even though a market correction was pending. After the inevitable market correction, home prices dropped down to their expected levels based on historical growth rate, forcing many to default on their loans. The guy I bought my home from owned $600k more than the home was valued. The bank agreed to take the $600k loss on the sale. The increased supply reduced construction of new homes and contributed to a global market collapse. Loan restrictions were put in place to prevent similar events. Again I wouldn’t call this even a “cycle”, nor would I assume it is going to happen again at any sort of regular interval.</p>
<p>This type of market correction can happen in many other fields besides engineering. For example, if US health care had more of an open market condition, I’d expect a similar correction to happen. This doesn’t mean I’d advise everyone to stay out of health care fields.</p>
<p>The cyclic nature of the hiring cycles comes about for many different reasons. The latest housing boom/bust cycle came about because of financing practices. It was something else before that in the 1970’s and again in the 1980’s. It will be something else again in the future.</p>
<p>Makes it kind of hard to try to pick the trend to figure out what field of engineering to go into. Better to follow your passion and do well in school. Those with the passion and good skills have a much easier time to find employment no matter where in the cycle it is (although in down times, it won’t be that easy).</p>
Aside from the recent housing crisis, there has only been 1 year in which the median home sales price in the United States did not increase during the period from 1970 to present (a ~2% decrease in 1991). Nothing anywhere near the scale of the recent housing crisis has happened in the US since World War I, nor is it expected to happen any time soon in the future. Both World War I and the subprime mortgage crisis were triggered by unique events that are not expected to repeat any time soon. I think it’s silly to choose a career out of fear of this type of event.</p>
Of course, this means that not hiring people in the first place is a good business decision. Hire contractors, find a way to make do with less engineers, etc.</p>
<p>Also, layoffs for older engineers is a very common occurrence regardless of this.</p>
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, biomedical engineers had an unemployment rate of 0.4% in 2012, which is one of the lowest unemployment rates of any careers with a statistically significant sample size. Fitting with the low unemployment rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 62% growth rate in this field in the next 10 years, which is one of the largest growth rates of any career with a statistically significant sample size. I don’t think biomedical engineers as a whole are struggling to find work, including at the undergraduate level.</p>
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Employment rates for recent grads in engineering are on the lower side… not as low as nursing or eduction, but well below average. Part of the reason why some humanities fields have similar employment rates relates to humanities majors often being open to a wide variety of different positions, sometimes in fields with little relation to their major, for a lower salary. Engineering jobs tend to be specialized with a higher salary.</p>
<p>I have 3 degrees in engineering fields and currently work in the digital communications area (also started successful Internet company). During my experience, I haven’t seen layoffs of staff after projects. However, it’s not uncommon to hire temporary contractors for a particular project, then not continue them after the project ends. At some companies, it’s quite difficult for a staff member to get fired, outside of ownership changes. A friend of mind who works for a tech company in the Northeast with hundreds of engineers tells me his company has only laid off one staff engineer in the several years he has been there. That one engineer was caught shooting heroin while in his office. Company ownership changes and/or start-up failures are a different story. During an ownership change, it’s not uncommon to drop whole departments. When I started at my current company there were 300+ employees. After a rapid series of ownership changes, we dropped down to under 15 people. Now we are back to 100+. When many employees were being dropped, I felt like I had more job opportunities that at any other time since graduating from college since with so many employees switching companies, many encouraged colleagues to switch companies with them (earning the referring employee a large referral bonus).</p>