<p>Joy? Any worries? Do you think it's a realistic prediction that many engineering grads won't have jobs due to outsourcing? Maybe the fact that baby boomers are moving out will balance it out?</p>
<p>What are your thoughts? Any back-up plans for worst-case scenario?</p>
<p>Outsourcing is overblown. There will always be jobs for engineering majors (hint: engineering majors can get jobs outside of engineering). You can always get a minor in a liberal-arts field to get a job with later, or double major in a science and go into academia. In any event try to be towards the top of the pack because it’s the bottom 20% of engineers who are most at risk.</p>
<p>AuburnMathTutor what do you mean by "In any event try to be towards the top of the pack because it’s the bottom 20% of engineers who are most at risk. "</p>
<p>Is that the bottom 20% at one’s college, region, or what?</p>
<p>That’s a good question. I suppose that my suggestion only really has meaning if you take the entire community of graduating engineers in your major discipline. I guess I would confine it to at least the whole US.</p>
<p>I pulled 20% out of thin air. My point is that if you are better than the guy sitting next to you, you have less to worry about. If you’re the best one in an auditorium of 1000 other people, you have less to worry about. And how do you get to be the best? Study and practice.</p>
<p>AMT is right, I think! And remember that the studying doesn’t end once you get out of school. You have to keep reading and going to seminars to keep up with the latest developments and products. That’s one thing I like about owning our own firm - we don’t have to ask permission to pay for seminars or buy books.</p>
<p>Anybody that knows the state of this countrys infrastructure knows that there is going to be a demand for engineers well into the future.</p>
<p>^could you elaborate on that, carnelian?</p>
<p>This country’s infrastructure is in such horrible condition that ASCE estimates it’ll take $2.2 trillion over the next 5 years to bring it up to a good condition. That means plenty of work for electrical (power) and civil engineers.</p>
<p>Yeah, but that mainly only applies to civil engineers and some electrical engineers.
But then the other electrical engineers seem like they’re all getting outsourced…</p>
<p>I’m in college now with a few semesters remaining. This current economic state of ours as put a damper on my views on employment opportunities but I still have an optimistic view. Maybe I’ve bought into what may have been lies from almost everyone saying that we need engineers but I have seen several of my former classmates graduate and accepting great jobs - several of whom had offers a semester before their graduation. Of course, those students were great students: solid GPAs (not 4.0s but definitely a 3.0 or better), extracurriculars, work/internship experience, volunteer work, leadership qualities, and most importantly networking. Take advantage of every career fair or networking event you can. </p>
<p>Regardless, I believe the outlook for engineers is far better than our peers in other majors. My friend will be graduating next month with a degree in MIS. He recently received an offer but before he was considering enrolling in grad school for an MBA. He admitted that it was real tough finding a job but he also said “you won’t have to worry. engineers are still doing yall thing”. translation: engineers were still getting job offers.</p>
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<p>How could it all be outsourced? Think about it. Most of the existing infrastructure is not going to get replaced, but updated and repaired. That means that you have to physically have engineers in this country that can go to the site and perform engineering studies.</p>
<p>Also, wouldn’t big engineering projects use enviromenal engineers? Wouldn’t updating the power grids also require mechanical engineers? Wouldn’t projects concerning water need chemical engineers and/or biosystems engineers? Don’t industrial engineers have the opportunity to jump into a variety of roles on any of these huge projects?</p>
<p>When you take into account the vast size of our country and the amount of work that needs to be done, I’m sure you will realize that even though most of the jobs might go to civil and/or electrical, there will be jobs for other engineers too.</p>
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<p>Couldn’t we just import engineers for less? It’s also a possibility with doctors…</p>
<p>I’m not terribly worried about it. I mean, engineering jobs are gonna be in demand by the time we graduate and there is a need for them because engineers are retiring due to the baby boomers so regardless of what engineering you’re in, I think the future looks fine. All those rumors of outsourcing is pretty overblown because there is a need for domestic engineering jobs.</p>
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<p>Civil engineering (and related mech/elec engineering) in other parts of the world is not necessarily the same as civil engineering here. Construction methodolgies, materials, designs, standards, etc. can be quite different. </p>
<p>I had been in India working with some engineers as part of my research and found that they were completely lost when it came to American plumbing drawings. I currently work with an inspector who recently moved here from Africa and structural steel and metal decks are a foreign concept for him. If you import engineers for infrastructure projects, there’s going to be a lot of training involved. They’ll also be handicapped if English is not their native language because the government entities and contractors will be American.</p>
<p>It seems like it would be really hard for an engineer to go from metric drawings to ones using English units. 2’-1 1/16", ack!</p>
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<p>There is a little thing called congress. Congress would then have to approve thousands of additional work visas and permanet resident visas for these people. They have indicated that they are not interested in doing that.</p>
<p>Our government accepts 140,000 workers for permanent residence annually, and 65,000 professional workers for temporary residence annually. We have a population of 300 million. Countries such as Canada (33 million) and Australia (21 million) take in similar amounts of professionals – can you see a problem?</p>
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When I had worked for a state agency, I had to use metric AND English. The department was trying to convert everyone to metric and thus had all the designs and specifications in metric. However, the contractors used the English system and all their shop drawings used those units. arghh!</p>